GOP Cut Backroom Deal with Obama Administration During 2016 Election
During a presidential debate, former first lady Hillary Clinton infamously commented on accepting election results. Her words, for the past two years, have come back to bite her and her supporters in the backside as raging hypocrites.
In fact, on more than one occasion she addressed the topic. She vowed to accept the results and spent time criticizing anyone who didn’t, implying that would be the reaction of then-presidential candidate Donald Trump.
Her implication was likely based on Trump stating things such as election rigging concerns and joking about accepting the results only if he won. Clinton had spoken about the importance of a “peaceful transfer of power’ and stated that not accepting the results was “a direct threat to our democracy.”
Perhaps with this in mind, according to NYMag Intelligencer, the Obama Administration had a plan to circumvent Trump objections — and it involved prominent members of the Republican party.
The publication interviewed both Ben Rhodes, Obama’s senior aide and speechwriter, and Jen Psaki, Obama’s communications director. They revealed a plan formulated by Obama Administration senior staff members.
The offensive “called for congressional Republicans, former presidents, and former Cabinet-level officials including Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, to try and forestall a political crisis by validating the election result.” But that was only one aspect of it, and validating elections is itself a problem.
“In the event that Trump tried to dispute a Clinton victory, they would affirm the result as well as the conclusions reached by the U.S. intelligence community that Russian interference in the election sought to favor Trump, and not Clinton.”
Rhodes stated that, “We wanted to handle the Russia information in a way that was as bipartisan as possible.” After Trump won, parts of the plan have obviously been enacted, with the late Republican Sen. John McCain playing a role in the Russian collusion narrative.
This plan to shut down Trump and his objections to a Clinton win, according to the publication, has gone previously unreported. The publication clarified that a report regarding “Obama directing his staff to ‘prepare possible responses’ was regarding “claims of Russian interference in the election” outlined in “a July 2017 op-ed by Obama’s chief of staff, Denis McDonough.”
Psaki downplayed the plan, and elaborated further on the thinking behind needing it. In doing so, she admitted Obama was a divisive figure.
“There was recognition that we had a Democratic president who was quite popular but also divisive for a portion of the population. For them, just having him say the election was legitimate was not going to be enough.”
“We didn’t spend a lot of time theorizing about the worst thing that could happen — this isn’t a science-fiction movie. It was more about the country being incredibly divided and Trump’s supporters being angry.”
Interestingly, she added that they feared from conservatives what their base is actually engaging in since Trump won. “Would there be protesting? I don’t want to say violence, because we didn’t talk about that as I recall,” Psaki said.
She also said something else that applies very notably to the radical left, who have behaved like unhinged tantrum-throwers since the election results were announced. “He’s laying the groundwork for delegitimizing the process now — questioning our institutions, attacking their leadership. This is all fodder for his supporters to work with in the event that things go down a dark path for him.”
So while the left, including Clinton and Obama, engage in what was supposed to be Trump and his supporters’ behavior if he lost, parts of the plan have been enacted — most notably the Russian interference narrative and getting at least one prominent Republican member of Congress involved in working against Trump, in the form of his legitimacy as president.
There are those who claim if you want to know what the left is up to, just look at what they are accusing the right of doing. In this case, that theory seems to hold true.
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