Former Clinton aide Jennifer Palmieri has blasted President Trump for being “preoccupied” with allegations of ties between Russia and the Trump campaign and called him “obsessed” with proving he is a legitimate president. Palmieri leveled these criticisms despite her role in the Clinton team’s constant efforts to delegitimize the president by making claims about alleged Russian interference in the election.
Palmieri, who served as the communications director for the Clinton campaign, told the New York Times in a weekend article that Trump’s tweeting after his firing of FBI Director James Comey shows he is “more preoccupied” with the Russia controversy than once thought.
“What we’ve really learned is either he’s worried about Russia because he’s got a significant vulnerability or he’s worried about Russia because it undermines his electoral win,” Palmieri said. “He’s clearly been more preoccupied with it than we understood.”
Later in the article, Palmieri expressed shock about Trump’s frequent references to his long-shot win in November.
“It is remarkable,” she said. “Has there been a president ever who’s been that obsessed about proving that he’s legitimate?”
Yet Palmieri’s remarks, and the Times’ reporting, ignores the role Palmieri — as well as others on the Clinton campaign team — have played in trying to delegitimize Trump’s election.
The recent book on the failed Clinton campaign, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign, documents that the narrative of how Russia was partly to blame for Clinton’s loss was formulated within 24 hours of Clinton’s concession. That narrative has been peddled by Clinton aides and media outlets ever since.
Just last week, Clinton campaign chair, John Podesta, tweeted out a video claiming to “connect the dots” between Russia and Trump. Palmieri retweeted the rambling almost-eight minute video complete with meandering spider diagrams:
On Friday, the Washington Post published an op-ed by Podesta, which called for the firing of Trump’s top aides who refuse to speak “truth to power,” and called for “a special counsel to investigate Russia’s interference in our election, possible collusion by the Trump campaign, and Trump’s ongoing attempts to interfere in the investigation.”
That op-ed was tweeted twice by Palmieri, the second time with the caption “So good, had to retweet again.”
In March, Palmieri wrote a piece for the Washington Post, ominously titled “The Clinton campaign warned you about Russia. But nobody listened to us”:
Now that Trump is president, though, the stakes are higher, because the Russian plot succeeded. The lessons we campaign officials learned in trying to turn the Russia story against Trump can help other Democrats (and all Americans) figure out how to treat this interference no longer as a matter of electoral politics but as the threat to the republic that it really is.
At an event in New York in May, Clinton herself blamed Russia for her election woes. While saying she took responsibility for her election defeat, she then blamed that defeat on alleged Russian interference in the election, as well as Comey’s actions related to the FBI’s investigation into her private email use.
“I was on the way to winning until the combination of Jim Comey’s letter on October 28 and Russian WikiLeaks raised doubts in the minds of people who were inclined to vote for me but got scared off,” she said.
At that event, she also described herself as “part of the resistance” — not something that someone who believed the occupant of the White House is legitimate would normally say.
Adam Shaw is a Politics Reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter: @AdamShawNY.
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