President Trump’s reelection campaign is moving to wield the Mueller report’s assessment against Democrats in 2020, calling for an investigation in the Obama’s administration for instigating the federal probe into allegations Trump colluded with Russia to defeat Hillary Clinton.
Although the Mueller inquiry determined that Russia meddled in the 2016 campaign to boost Trump, the investigation concluded neither the president, his associates, nor his campaign worked with Moscow to defeat Clinton. After those findings were made public Thursday with the issuance of the report, Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale said the previous administration should be forced to explain a probe initiated on its watch.
[READ: Robert Mueller’s redacted Russia report]
“Now that the collusion and obstruction conspiracy theories have been exposed for the pathetic hoaxes they always were, the Obama-era [Department of Justice] and FBI must answer for their misdeeds and the scam that they perpetrated against the American people. Justice will be served,” Parscale said. “President Trump has been fully and completely exonerated yet again. Now the tables have turned, and it’s time to investigate the liars who instigated this sham investigation into President Trump, motivated by political retribution and based on no evidence whatsoever.”
That theme — “turning the tables” on the Democrats — or some variation of it, was what the Trump campaign ran with immediately after Attorney General William Barr delivered the Mueller report to Congress. Team Trump issued a fresh campaign video with that language as it replayed a series of prominent Democrats insisting over the course of the nearly two-year-long Mueller investigation that the president was guilty of collusion.
Another staple of the campaign’s messaging: “Investigate the investigators.” The Republican National Committee, working in tandem with Trump 2020, was using similar language in series of press releases, as it emphasized that Russian meddling occurred while Barack Obama was president.
“Bottom line: Not only did Mueller confirm that there was no collusion, we also learned the full extent of how much the Obama administration failed to act while Russia messed with America’s electoral process,” read a missive from RNC rapid response director Steve Guest.
Ironically, Trump has typically declined to similarly acknowledge Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election and accompany it with promises to get to the bottom of what happened and prevent Russia from similar interference in the future. Instead, the president usually referred to the Mueller investigation as a witch hunt out to find meddling by Moscow that did not happen — or if it did, that was done to boost Clinton.
The aggressive push to gain from the Mueller report suggests Trump will continue to raise the issue as his reelection bid accelerates, despite a booming economy to brag about that also affords him among his highest, issue-based approval ratings.
[Also read: Trump’s approval spikes before Mueller report release, set to go higher]
