Having been in office for over a year at this point, U.S. President Donald Trump has had plenty of opportunities to share a whole host of excuses for the Russia scandal. Often, it’s fake news; sometimes, the Russians didn’t meddle in the election at all — and sometimes, Barack Obama should have done more to stop it.
That’s the excuse that Trump shared on Twitter this Saturday while overseas, where he will soon meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin himself.
Trump wrote:
‘These Russian individuals did their work during the Obama years. Why didn’t Obama do something about it? Because he thought Crooked Hillary Clinton would win, that’s why. Had nothing to do with the Trump Administration, but Fake News doesn’t want to report the truth, as usual!’
It’s not as though many people expect to find evidence that Obama covered up Russian election meddling in support of Hillary Clinton’s presidential candidacy.
No amount of rhetorical maneuvering from the current president will change reality. Obama, on a basic level, did do “something about it,” having imposed sanctions on Russian interests and expelled Russian officials from the United States after the election. It’s Trump’s own first national security Michael Flynn who undercut those very sanctions in talks with then-Russian Ambassador to the United States Sergei Kislyak, admonishing the Russians against taking the sanctions too personally considering the friendliness towards Russia of the then-incoming Trump administration.
Those communications were not immediately known. In the meantime, Obama’s administration continued to work to address Russian election meddling. It was on January 6 of last year, in the last few weeks of the Obama administration, that the nation’s intelligence agencies — headed by individuals he’d put there — released a comprehensive report to the public outlining their understanding of Russian meddling activities during the 2016 election cycle.
Then, Donald Trump took office. He has refused to take major steps to accept the responsibility of addressing Russian election interference. Reporter Jim Sciutto noted in response to another similar tweet from the current president that the nation’s current intelligence chiefs told the Senate as recently as mid-February of this year that Trump had given them no direction to counter Russian election meddling.
In the absence of presidential leadership, the task of addressing Russian election meddling has fallen to Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who the president routinely tries to undercut.
As recently as this past Wednesday, Trump posed the fallacy riddled question on Twitter:
‘How can the Rigged Witch Hunt proceed when it was started, influenced and worked on, for an extended period of time, by former FBI Agent/Lover Peter Strzok?’
There remains no evidence that any of Peter Strzok’s personal feelings about the repugnant behavior of Donald Trump ever affected the course of an investigation.
This past Friday, the “rigged witch hunt” led by Special Counsel Mueller produced indictments of twelve Russian intelligence officers for election meddling related crimes. Those indictments provide the context for the president’s latest ranting about the investigation.
Whether he likes the idea or not, that investigation will continue.
Check out Twitter’s response below.
Featured Image via Getty Images
