White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said it is important that people know what former officials in President Barack Obama’s administration were saying during the counterintelligence investigation into Russia meddling in the 2016 election.
“We learned from newly released transcripts a few things. We learned that what some Obama officials were saying publicly was much different than what they were saying privately,” McEnany said Tuesday. “James Clapper was out there saying that he had evidence that this was worse than Watergate, when, in fact, a few weeks later, he said privately, ‘I never saw any direct empirical evidence that the Trump campaign or someone in it was plotting or conspiring with Russia.'”
Newly released transcripts regarding the Russia investigation show Obama’s spy chief and other top national security and law enforcement officials had no evidence that the 2016 Trump campaign was colluding with the country, but pressed on with their investigation nonetheless.
Special counsel Robert Mueller determined Russia had meddled in the election using disinformation, but the report “did not establish” a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the country.
McEnany, a sharp critic of Obama during her stint as a cable news personality before joining Trump’s campaign, said the transcripts “bring the question to light, why then did we have many years of investigating collusion that these Obama administration officials [knew] never existed?”
“But for three years, the American people were dragged through the mud and told that their choice for the president of the United States might have been a Russian asset based on no evidence at all,” she said. “This president was exonerated by the Mueller report, and there are some real questions for these individuals …”
