Heidi M Przybyla

USA TODAY

Hillary Clinton’s former campaign team is seizing on news reports that the Russian government has obtained potentially compromising personal and financial information about President-elect Donald Trump.

Brian Fallon and Josh Schwerin, who both served as Clinton spokesmen, underscored a series of memos outlining the information meant the Kremlin could be in a position to blackmail the next U.S. leader. All of them reacted via Twitter.

“This is only credible theory for why Trump refuses to accept intelligence community's finding that Russia was behind hacks,” Fallon said. He was referring to Trump’s repeated refusal to publicly accept the findings of U.S. intelligence agencies that Russian President Vladimir Putin is behind the hacking of Clinton’s campaign chairman and the Democratic National Committee.

Trump is scheduled on Wednesday to hold his first formal news conference since July. “No matter what he tweets in next 24 hours, Trump must be interrogated about Russia more than anything else at his press conference,” said Fallon.

Schwerin also suggested Russia may seek to blackmail Trump with information it may have obtained. “There’s a reason all presidential candidates traditionally release tax returns and have full financial transparency. Blackmail should be impossible,” said Schwerin. Jesse Ferguson, also a campaign spokesman, said "could we really go from our first black male president to our first blackmailed president?"

Others, including Clinton's 2008 campaign manager, Neera Tanden, suggested Trump’s Russia ties could be documented in his tax returns, which he still has not released.

The role Russia played in influencing the outcome of the 2016 election is a major frustration for the Clinton team, which had long argued that hacked emails obtained by WikiLeaks were traceable to Russia and being deliberately distributed to hurt Clinton’s campaign.

Former Harry Reid spokesman Adam Jentleson also took to Twitter on Tuesday to say that the former Senate Democratic leader had seen the documents before writing an October letter to FBI Director James Comey about Trump’s ties to Russia. The letter asserted that Comey was in possession of “explosive information” about close ties and coordination between Trump, his top advisers and the Russian government.

“Now you know,” Jentleson said, in a series of tweets, which also included this:

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