WASHINGTON — Nearly three weeks after Election Day, Hillary Clinton's campaign said Saturday that it would participate in a recount process in Wisconsin incited by a third-party candidate and would join any potential recounts in two other closely contested states, Pennsylvania and Michigan.
The Clinton campaign held out little hope of success in any of the three states and said it had seen no "actionable evidence" of vote hacking that might taint the results or otherwise provide new grounds for challenging Donald Trump's victory. But it suggested it was going along with the recount effort to assure supporters that it was doing everything possible to verify that hacking by Russia or other irregularities had not affected the results.
In a post on Medium, Marc Elias, the Clinton team's general counsel, said the campaign would take part in the Wisconsin recount being set off by Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, and would also participate if Stein made good on her plans to seek recounts in Michigan and Pennsylvania. Clinton lost those three states by a total of little more than 100,000 votes, sealing her Electoral College defeat by Trump.
The Clinton campaign had assailed Trump during the election for refusing to say he would abide by the results if he lost. On Saturday, Trump responded to the campaign's decision to join the recount with a statement calling the effort "ridiculous" and "a scam by the Green Party."
He suggested that most of the money raised would not be spent on the recount. "The results of this election should be respected instead of being challenged and abused, which is exactly what Jill Stein is doing," Trump said.
In Wisconsin, Trump leads by 22,177 votes. In Michigan, he has a lead of 10,704 votes, and in Pennsylvania, his advantage is 70,638 votes.
Elias suggested in his essay that the Clinton campaign was joining the recount effort with little expectation that it would change the result. But many of the campaign's supporters, picking up on its frequent complaints of Russian interference in the election, have enthusiastically backed Stein's efforts, putting pressure on the Clinton team to show that it is exploring all options.
Elias used his essay to describe an intensive behind-the-scenes effort by the campaign to look for signs of Russian hacking activity or other irregularities in the vote count.
Stein filed for a recount in Wisconsin on Friday afternoon, about an hour before the deadline. She has raised more than $5 million for the effort, which will now turn to Michigan and Pennsylvania, where there are deadlines in the coming week.
In his post, Elias sounded less enthusiastic than the recount's many supporters. "Because we had not uncovered any actionable evidence of hacking or outside attempts to alter the voting technology," he wrote, "we had not planned to exercise this option ourselves."
He added, "Now that a recount has been initiated in Wisconsin, we intend to participate in order to ensure the process proceeds in a manner that is fair to all sides."
If Stein pursues additional recounts, "we will take the same approach in those states as well," he wrote. But he noted that the "number of votes separating Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in the closest of these states — Michigan — well exceeds the largest margin ever overcome in a recount."
The Clinton campaign will not contribute financially to the effort, which has been funded by small contributions. But it will pay to have its own lawyers present at the recount, campaign officials said.
The Obama administration issued a statement to The New York Times on Friday in response to questions about intelligence findings related to Russian interference in the election. In the statement, it said it had concluded that the election was free of interference.
The administration issued a second statement Saturday saying that "the federal government did not observe any increased level of malicious cyberactivity aimed at disrupting our electoral process on Election Day."
Clinton conceded the race to Trump early on Nov. 9, when it became clear that he would have a large margin of victory in the Electoral College. But as her lead in the popular vote has grown — it now exceeds 2 million votes — her base has increasingly pressured her to challenge the results.
That has been fueled in part by how aggressively the Clinton campaign spread the word of Russian involvement in the theft of emails from the Democratic National Committee and from the personal account of John D. Podesta, the campaign's chairman. The campaign also charged that the Russians were behind fake news about Clinton's health, among other stories — a claim supported to some extent by recent studies.
Some critics saw those accusations as an effort to shift the discussion from mistakes the Clinton campaign had made in taking on Trump.
Elias' post offered a revealing look at how much time and energy the campaign had spent in the past two weeks looking for evidence of Russian hacking or other irregularities, and how it had tried to keep those efforts secret.
"Since the day after the election, we have had lawyers and data scientists and analysts combing over the results to spot anomalies that would suggest a hacked result," Elias wrote.
"Most of those discussions have remained private, while at least one has unfortunately been the subject of leaks," he wrote, a reference to conversations between Podesta and a group of experts that included J. Alex Halderman, a computer scientist with deep experience in the vulnerabilities of voting systems.
Halderman recently put his own post on Medium, describing his suspicions and the case for recounts. But even he doubted that the election result would change.