Officials on Hilary Clinton's failed presidential campaign are reportedly blaming former President Barack Obama for her election loss–more so than Russian hacks or FBI Director James Comey.
Clinton's team is "bitter" at Obama for not doing enough to quickly combat the negative press from Russian interference in the presidential election, Axios reported.
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.
"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," a Clinton campaign official told Axios. "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."
Clinton staffers also blame Obama more than the former secretary of state herself for the surprise election loss to Donald Trump in November, according to Axios.
Obama's White House intentionally kept a distance from news of Russian meddling in the election to avoid politicizing the cyber breaches and to ensure the voting was unsullied.
The former president also thought, according to a top aide, that coordination with Republican officials "would have collapsed if [he] was seen as grandstanding," Axios reported.
The Clinton team appears to be suggesting that the leaked emails from staffers at the Democratic National Committee and her campaign chairman, John Podesta, ultimately cost her the election.
The U.S. intelligence community found that the Russian government was behind the election hacks as part of a broader cyber and disinformation campaign to undermine the American electoral process and hurt Clinton's candidacy.