On CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Donald Trump’s campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, fielded questions about allegations that Vladimir Putin’s Russian government took deliberate steps to help put Trump in the White House. Conway said there’s “no evidence” to support the allegation, thought the Central Intelligence Agency clearly disagrees.But just as importantly Conway characterized concerns about Russian interference as something new: “[I]f you go back and you listen to Clinton campaign spokespeople on your program and others, if you listen to their private briefings to media and others, they said very little about this.”Trump himself pushed a similar line this morning via Twitter: “Why wasn’t this brought up before election?”It was brought up before the election — many, many times.Hillary Clinton, for example, brought up this scandal in the first presidential debate, and then pushed the line even more aggressively in the second, only to keep driving the point home in the third.
“It’s pretty clear you won’t admit that the Russians have engaged in cyberattacks against the United States of America, that you encouraged espionage against our people, that you are willing to spout the Putin line, sign up for his wish list, break up NATO, do whatever he wants to do, and that you continue to get help from him, because he has a very clear favorite in this race.”So I think that this is such an unprecedented situation. We’ve never had a foreign government trying to interfere in our election. We have 17 intelligence agencies, civilian and military, who have all concluded that these espionage attacks, these cyberattacks, come from the highest levels of the Kremlin and they are designed to influence our election. I find that deeply disturbing.”
And it wasn’t just Clinton. The White House put the spotlight on this; congressional Democrats did the same; hell, I wrote wrote dozens of posts about this myself.Even Mike Pence, Trump’s own running mate, conceded in October that there’s “more and more evidence that implicates Russia” in the cyber-attacks. Pence added that “there should be serious consequences” for Russia.”Why wasn’t this brought up before election?” For crying out loud, it was brought up before the election, repeatedly. Voters largely overlooked the story, however, in part because Trump refused to acknowledge the scandal’s existence, and in part because Hillary Clinton’s clumsy I.T. practices were considered vastly more important than a foreign adversary taking unprecedented steps to intervene in an American election in support for Vladimir Putin’s preferred candidate.Republicans may not like recent history, but they shouldn’t be allowed to rewrite it.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."