In the wake of a redacted version of the final report from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation dropping, President Donald Trump is really pulling out all the stops to try and cover for himself. One of his latest targets is — wait for it — President Barack Obama. According to the latest paranoid social media ramblings from the president of the United States, Obama should be held accountable for the Russia scandal because it unfolded on his watch.
Trump shouted on Twitter:
‘Anything the Russians did concerning the 2016 Election was done while Obama was President. He was told about it and did nothing! Most importantly, the vote was not affected.’
That’s really not a convincing argument any way you look at it, let alone one that’s substantive in the first place. Trump is lying about Obama having done “nothing,” and he’s lying about the vote not having been “affected.” It’s true, yes, that Russian hackers were not documented to have altered ballots or final counts, but their misinformation campaigns definitely had an impact on the choices people made. The fact that a global conspiracy to install an individual favorable to an authoritarian regime had a part in the 2016 elections should be concerning — but it’s yesterday’s news to Trump, apparently, who takes the real villain as Obama.
To be clear, the Obama administration began investigating the Russia scandal right away, all the way back in 2016 when Trump claims they “did nothing.” They sought to bring the limited information about the issue they had to the public, but Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) flatly rebuffed the effort, according to then-Vice President Joe Biden. In POLITICO’s description, the former vice president says the still serving Senator “stopped the Obama administration from speaking out about Russian interference in the 2016 campaign by refusing to sign on to a bipartisan statement of condemnation,” and the Obama team did not want to itself seem to be engaging in political showmanship by going after Republican-supporting political efforts without Republicans on their side. At the time, though, McConnell had foreshadowed how political Republicans would eventually treat the scandal of Russia having interfered in the elections, claiming it as a horrible smear even as the evidence piled up.
From there, the Obama administration kept investigating anyway, and they released a report on the issue early the following year as the evidence kept piling up.
In other words, Trump is lying. Again.
Check out Twitter’s response…
Featured Image via screenshot
