For the second time in as many days, President Trump took aim at his predecessor, former President Obama, for what Trump said was a fai…
His tweets have the power to shape international relations, send stock prices up — or down — and galvanize the American public.
We’re watching how Donald Trump is using this platform of unfettered communication now that he’s commander in chief. Here is everything Trump has tweeted since he was sworn in as 45th president of the United States. In many cases, we look at what he was reacting to and whether what he said was accurate. And, as much as possible, we’ll relate what else was going on at the time. Check back for more as Trump continues to tweet.
For the second time in as many days, President Trump took aim at his predecessor, former President Obama, for what Trump said was a failure to act on intelligence that Russia was meddling in the 2016 election.
Trump appeared to quote from a Washington Post report detailing the Obama administration’s struggle to decide how to punish Russia for its alleged interference in the U. S. presidential election. “I feel like we sort of choked, ” a former Obama administration official told the paper in describing those deliberations.
The Post report stated that the CIA informed Obama in August that Russian President Vladimir Putin was directly involved in a hacking campaign to disrupt the election by defeating Hillary Clinton and helping to elect Trump.
The Obama administration responded by issuing a series of warnings to Russia and later approved a package of punitive measures that included economic sanctions. Obama also authorized the planting of cyberweapons in Russia’s infrastructure in a measure that was still in its planning stages when he left office, according to the Post report.
The Obama administration first publicly announced Russia’s alleged election meddling on Oct. 7 but stopped short of saying that the efforts were aimed at helping Trump win.
Administration officials did not act more forcefully against Russia in the days leading up to the Nov. 8 election because they believed that their warnings had been sufficient to compel the country to abandon any plans of further aggression, and because they were concerned that any action could be perceived as political interference in an already heated campaign, according to the Post .
That concern was heightened, the report noted, by the fact that, as a candidate, Trump had already predicted that the election would be rigged and suggested that he might not accept the legitimacy of the results. The Obama administration’s assumption that Clinton would be the victor also contributed to its lack of urgency, according to the Post.
Trump made similar comments the day before, tweeting that the Obama administration knew of Russia’s activities «far in advance» of the election but took no action.
That came after Trump had for months maintained that reports of Russian election meddling amounted to «a scam» cooked up by Democrats as an excuse for losing the election.
His latest tweets came as the Justice Department and at least four congressional committees continue to investigate Russia’s alleged election interference, including possible ties between Russia and members of Trump’s campaign team.
Trump has repeatedly decried those investigations as «a witch hunt.»
