Axios: Team Clinton More Angry At Obama Than Putin Or FBI Director James Comey Over Election Loss

With President Donald Trump occupying the White House, it must still be hard for Hillary Clinton, two-time presidential loser, to finally come to grips that the nation would never want to see her lead them—ever. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) said that after the election, Clinton was hurt and in a state of mourning. With reports of Russian interference and the last minute update from the FBI that they would review new emails found on Clinton top aide Huma Abedin’s laptop, the power couple fumed. Clinton blamed Russia and FBI Director James Comey for dashing her presidential hopes. The Clinton camp said that Comey’s letter to Congress informing them of the review was unprecedented, despite Bill Clinton jumping on an indictment of the late Caspar Weinberger, Reagan’s defense secretary, over charges stemming from the Iran-Contra Affair to discredit then-President George H.W. Bush’s presidency just four days before the 1992 election. The fact is that whether intentional or not, in most cases not—legal updates that put the opponent in a negative light are going to be used.

With the Clintons’ history of secrecy and playing by their own rules, this was going to stick. Yet, as Axios noted on January 31, the Clinton campaign is actually more infuriated with Obama than Russia or Comey over the election loss:

The reason: Clintonites feel that if Obama had come out early and forcefully with evidence of Russian interference in the campaign, and perhaps quicker sanctions, she might be president today. His caution, they argue, allowed the public to have a foggy sense of clear, calculated, consistent Russian meddling in the campaign. We can't stress enough how upset some Democrats are. It's testing relationships between Clinton and Obama loyalists. It's making efforts to form a new Trump opposition coalition harder.

A Clinton campaign official told us: "The White House was like everyone else: They thought she'd win anyway. ... If he had done more, it might have lessened a lot of aggrieved feelings, although I don't think it would have altered the outcome. The Russia thing was like a spy novel, and anything he had said or done would have helped get people to believe it was real."

My lord—it’s another example of the Clinton apparatus, and the former first lady herself, being incapable of taking responsibility for the loss. She didn’t reach out to the working class, a colossal mistake. She wasn’t straight with the email fiasco, which in turn made the media suspicious when the narrative fell apart, which led to the media scrutinizing her new explanations for why she had an unauthorized and unsecure home brew sever to conduct official State Department business. When those also collapsed under analysis of the facts and the IG report that said State Department officials didn’t sign off on the server and if such a request were brought to their attention—it would have been rejected. The endless half-truths and outright lies from the Clinton campaign only rehashed the unflattering characteristics of the power couple from the 1980s and 1990s: They’re secretive, play by their own rules, and its politics all the time. It’s what torpedoed her on character issues—trust, honest, etc.—during the primaries that carried over into the general. She also wasn’t well liked. The more she talked, the more people hated her.