Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta – whose emails were hacked and leaked during the 2016 campaign – called out President Trump Sunday for not doing more to punish the Russians for their interference or prep the nation for when the Kremlin tries to do it again.
‘If this is information warfare, then I think he’s the first draft-dodger in the war,’ Podesta claimed of Trump on Face the Nation.
Asked about Trump’s motivations, Podesta said that Trump’s psyche is ‘complicated,’ but added that ‘he certainly can’t accept that this activity may have helped him, and I think he just constantly tries to move the ball away.’
Hillary Clinton’s former campaign chairman John Podesta (pictured) called President Trump a ‘draft-dodger’ for not doing more to combat the Russian threat of ‘information warfare’
CBS News’ Nancy Cordes (right) asked John Podesta (left) if he thought Russian interference actually swung the election to President Trump. Podesta said he thought it had some effect
‘Including what was, I think, really a despicable tweet about the fact that he’s blaming the FBI for investigating the Russia investigation and somehow relating that to the tragic killings in Florida,’ Podesta continued.
Trump, during a Twitter rant on Saturday, had suggested the FBI had been spending too much time investigating Russian collusion, and that’s why they mishandled the tip about shooting subject Nikolas Cruz.
‘Very sad that the FBI missed all of the many signals sent out by the Florida school shooter,’ Trump wrote. ‘This is not acceptable. They are spending too much time trying to prove Russian collusion with the Trump campaign – there is no collusion.’
Podesta said Trump ‘has failed in carrying out his duty as president of the United States, which is to protect our democracy.’
‘I mean, he has done nothing but tried to undermine the Mueller investigation, he hasn’t implemented the sanctions that he – was passed by the Congress and that he signed in reaction to the, to the activities in the 2016 campaign,’ Podesta said.
‘We learned this week, he’s ordered no effort to try to get the intelligence community to get together to try to prevent further activities in the 2018 election,’ Podesta said.
CBS’ Nancy Cordes also wanted to know if Podesta thought Russia’s meddling actually had an impact on the vote.
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein took great pains to mention Friday, as he handed down 13 indictments to Russian nationals as part of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe, that Russian tampering did not swing the election.
Podesta pointed out that those indictments just applied to Russia’s disinformation social media campaign, and didn’t even touch the hacking of emails, like the ones from Podesta’s account.
‘We won the popular vote by there millions votes, they were pushing votes – just to give one example – to Jill Stein. Her vote in Michigan, in Pennsylvania, in Wisconsin was greater than the gap between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in those states,’ Podesta noted.
‘So you can’t prove that it did effect the outcome, but it certainly seems likely that it had some impact,’ the Clinton campaign official said.