Former United States Secretary of State and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton on Saturday blamed Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey’s letters to the House of Representatives on her emails for her loss in the November 8 election. While Clinton was projected as the winner of the election by several polls, she lost to businessman and Republican Party nominee Donald Trump.

In a call with Democratic Party donors, Clinton said her campaign’s post-election analysis showed that Comey’s letters “raising doubts” about her email use proved to be a turning point for her bid to be president. The points raised in the FBI director’s correspondence to Congress were “groundless, baseless” and stopped the campaign’s momentum, Clinton said.

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Comey’s decision to publicly announce the renewed examination of her use of a private email server had led to a significant loss of support for her in the states in the upper Midwest region of the country, the former Democratic Party candidate added, according to Reuters.

However, a Clinton supporter present on the call said there were several reasons for her loss and that she was not trying to analyse the results during the conference with party donors. On November 6, the FBI declared that Clinton was not guilty of any criminal wrongdoing with respect to her private email server. Comey told congressional leaders that the agency had not changed its conclusion on the matter, referring to their giving her a clean chit in July.

Comey had faced severe criticism for announcing on October 29 that it had reopened the probe into Clinton’s private server on suspicion that she had been remiss in handling classified information related to national security. Clinton’s campaign had suffered a major blow when Comey had announced the investigation, allowing Trump to close the gap between them in pre-election polls.