Hillary Clinton accuses Donald Trump of encouraging 'Russian hackers' to attack US

This photo taken on November 7, 2016 shows Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton speaking during a rally outside the University of Pittsburgh's Cathedral of Learning in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (Photo by AFP)

Former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who lost the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump, has once again placed the blame on her Republican rival for the defeat, claiming that the billionaire businessman “encouraged Russian hackers” to cyberattack the US and find compromising information in order to disrupt her campaign.

Clinton made the comments in an interview with MSNBC, accusing Trump of supporting Russian hackers who "attacked the very heart of US democracy," and also warning about a looming "threat" from Moscow.

When asked about the controversy around her use of a private email server during her tenure as the secretary of state from 2009 to 2013, Clinton said that she wished "the government had had as high a level of security as there was on the server I used."

"There is no doubt that our government servers at the time I was serving as secretary of state were compromised," she noted. "And there is at least insofar as we know no evidence that my private server was."

The former Democratic presidential hopeful, however, claimed that "The Russians, encouraged by then-candidate Trump, were certainly doing everything they could to find anything that would have been on that [her private] server."

Russia did nothing short of attacking "the very heart of [US] democracy and then weaponized information by the theft of emails, by intruding into [US] voter registration and the electoral system," she added. "This is an ongoing threat."

​Clinton also pointed the finger of blame at China and North Korea, claiming that they either stole sensitive information or disrupted American servers.

This photo taken on October 19, 2016 shows former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton departing the stage following the third and final US presidential debate with former Republican nominee Donald Trump (background) at the Thomas & Mack Center on the campus of the University of Las Vegas in Las Vegas, Nevada. (By AFP)

Clinton sent more than 30,000 potentially confidential emails while heading the US State Department. This is despite the fact that she had deleted thousands of the emails before turning over the server.

The FBI conducted a criminal investigation into whether Clinton intended to violate US laws, but closed it and then reopened it again on account of new evidence just days before the November 8 election.

In both instances, former FBI Director James Comey recommended that the Justice Department should not criminally charge Clinton.

Before their ultimate face-off on November 8, Trump accused Clinton of violating federal laws for using a private email server and using her political links to get away with the crime. Clinton had been leading Trump throughout the campaign in most of the polls except for the last week of the election when she lost ground to Trump.

Trump stunned the world on November 8, 2016 by defeating Clinton, sending the United States on a new and uncertain path.

Clinton has, on numerous occasions, blamed Russia for losing the election to Trump, claiming that Moscow had colluded with her rival and had been behind the reported hacking of the Democratic National Committee's (DNC) email server. The allegations, however, have been repeatedly denied by both Trump and Russia.