A new book from former White House adviser Ben Rhodes claims that President Barack Obama and his top administration staff did not know about the FBI’s investigation into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia until they left office.
A preview from the New York Times of Rhode’s memoir, “The World as It Is,” states that the former deputy national security adviser for strategic communications learned about the counterintelligence investigation in the same manner as the rest of the country: through media reports. He also explicitly wrote, per the Times, that Obama was not informed of the investigation until after the election.
Rhodes seems to suggest that the administration was caught off guard by the investigation because they were so sure Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton would win, yet still should have seen that defeat coming.
“When you distilled it, stripped out the racism and misogyny, we’d run against Hillary eight years ago with the same message Trump had used,” he wrote. “She’s part of a corrupt establishment that can’t be trusted to bring change.”
Rhodes also makes the claim that election night seriously shook Obama’s confidence in his own legacy.
“What if we were wrong?” he reportedly asked his aides in late November. “Maybe we pushed too far. Maybe people just want to fall back into their tribe.”
“Sometimes I wonder whether I was 10 or 20 years too early.”
“The World as It Is” is set to hit shelves next week.
