Democrats are angry — and this time it isn’t at President Trump. Instead, they’re fuming over revelations about the Obama administration’s decision not to go public last August with information about Russia’s attempts to intervene in the US presidential election.

As one former Obama official told the Washington Post, “I feel like we sort of choked.”

But the real problem here is not so much Barack Obama’s failure to act as the most plausible reason for his inaction: Vladimir Putin’s capers didn’t impact the election results.

Many on the left think that, regardless of whether Republicans colluded with Moscow — a charge for which there is still no proof — the Russians stole the election from Hillary Clinton. As the Washington Post breathlessly wrote, the Russian hacking was “the political crime of the century.”

That’s why Obama’s decision not to publicize the crime frustrates the left. They think he threw away a golden opportunity to ensure that Trump — the alleged beneficiary of Putin’s scheme — would be defeated.

While Democratic operatives like John Podesta, the Clinton campaign chair whose emails were hacked by the Russians, are willing to grant absolution to Obama, the explanations we’re hearing from the Obama camp are unpersuasive. The claim that Obama didn’t want to be seen as intervening in the campaign is laughable.

More plausible is the notion that he was sure Clinton would win anyway and making a big deal about the hacking would undermine the legitimacy of an election the Democrats thought they had in the bag.

But there’s a simpler, even more plausible explanation for Obama’s inaction: The president saw that the hacking was having almost no impact on the course of the campaign and thus wasn’t going to mess with the results. Far from the crime of the century, it was, at worst, a minor annoyance to Clinton that Obama obviously felt didn’t warrant a major dustup with Putin.

It’s true that Russia’s actions were outrageous and deserved a strong US response, both then and now. It can also be argued that the public had a right to know about it. But it was only after Clinton lost and she and her supporters began searching for excuses that Russia’s actions were considered an important factor in the outcome.

While Putin was way out of line, the impact of the WikiLeaks document dumps on Clinton’s candidacy was marginal at best.

The contents of the Democratic National Committee emails were embarrassing to Podesta and then-DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who wound up losing her job after proof of DNC collusion with Clinton against Bernie Sanders was produced. But there was almost nothing in those documents that related directly to Clinton, let alone being enough to influence voters.

Every WikiLeaks story was also almost immediately overshadowed by other, more damaging gaffes or revelations about Trump, such as his attack on a Gold Star family or the release of the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape. Nothing the Russians did matched the damage done by either of those Trump disasters.

If Clinton wound up losing anyway, it was because of her failures and bad decisions, not hacked emails. Short of an actual theft of votes at the ballot box — something that didn’t happen — there was nothing the Russians did that could have changed anything. Obama almost certainly understood that last August and therefore kept quiet.

Talk about crimes of the century makes Democrats feel better about losing to Trump. But if Obama “choked,” it was because he knew Putin’s despicable dirty tricks were unimportant. That’s of little comfort to Democrats who are still looking for a scapegoat and a way to make the bad dream of the Trump presidency go away. But it’s a brutal truth they need to accept if they are to move on from their 2016 recriminations.



Jonathan S. Tobin is opinion editor of JNS.org and a contributing writer for National Review.