As his campaign remains under investigation for possible collusion with Russia, President Trump is pointing fingers at Obama.
As his campaign remains under investigation for possible collusion with Russia, President Trump is pointing fingers at Obama.
Trump in an interview on Sunday accused his predecessor, President Barack Obama, of doing “nothing” about Russia’s interference in the 2016 election despite knowing about it for months.
The accusation, though, once again muddies where Trump himself stands on the reports of Russian meddling.
“I just heard today for the first time that Obama knew about Russia a long time before the election, and he did nothing about it, ” Trump told “Fox & Friends Weekend.”
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“The CIA gave him information on Russia a long time before the election… If he had the information, why didn’t he do something about it?”
Trump said the mainstream media was giving a free pass to Obama’s inactions while rigorously reporting on the investigations into the Trump campaign.
There are several congressional probes into Russia’s cyberattacks on the 2016 campaign, and Special Counsel Robert Mueller is investigating whether anyone in Trump’s campaign collaborated with the Kremlin.
Some of the hacks exposed emails from the Democratic National Committee that showed the party’s top officials disparaging the grassroots campaign from Bernie Sanders, the independent Vermont senator who challenged Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination.
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Trump picked this point on Sunday to once again blame Democrats for their election conduct.
“Hillary Clinton colluded with the Democratic Party in order to beat Crazy Bernie Sanders. Is she allowed to so collude? Unfair to Bernie!” he tweeted.
The election case took another turn on Friday when The Washington Post reported Obama knew last summer that Russian intelligence hackers were breaching networks tied to the Democratic Party. He debated for months on the proper punishment before settling on a series of mild sanctions and diplomatic expulsions in December — less than a month before he left office.
Much of the internal intelligence about the Russian attacks was kept from the public during the campaign, with the full scope of the Kremlin campaign coming into focus only after Trump’s victory.
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Despite his blasting of Obama, Trump has made a mystery of whether he even believes in the Russian meddling — and whether he plans to do anything about it.
He has alternatively given public statements that seemed to support and to doubt the intelligence community findings about Russia’s rouge role in the election. And even though the White House issued Russian sanctions last week over the Kremlin’s conflict in Ukraine, Trump has yet to announce any retaliation for the election hacks.
