Hillary Clinton and her campaign told us so

I told you so.

The four most satisfying words in the English language if you’re the one saying them, and the most annoying four words if you’re on the receiving end of them.

Except perhaps if you’re from the Hillary Clinton campaign, in which case I can’t imagine saying I told you so to the media and ultimately to the American public would be all that satisfying.

Earlier this week, the New York Times reported the incredible revelation that after nearly a full year of denying any contact with anyone from Russia, the Trump campaign had indeed met formally with a Russian lawyer with ties to the Kremlin, under the presumption that they would receive damaging information on Clinton. All three Trump campaign operatives, Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner, were aware before the meeting that it was with someone who was described in writing to them as a “Russian government attorney” with dirt on the former Secretary of State as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”

The talking points from the Trump administration and the blind Republican partisans immediately shifted from “we never had any contact with the Russians” to “so what we met with the Russians?” The shift was as staggering as it was surreal.

Then on Friday the Associated Press further added to the holes in the already incredibly porous account of the meeting as it confirmed that another person, Rinat Akhmetshin, had attended. As noted by the Associated Press, “Akhmetshin has been reported to have ties to Russian intelligence agencies, though he denies ever working as an intelligence agent. He told the AP that he served in the Soviet military in a unit that was part of counterintelligence but was never formally trained as a spy.”

As much as I would like to categorize this information as incredibly astounding, the reality is that we have been warned about the possibility of Russian influence in the election from the Clinton campaign as far back as last July. In the run-up to the Democratic convention, Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook told CNN that the leak of the stolen DNC emails was a clear indication that Russia was involved, in an ultimate effort to help Donald Trump.

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Mook’s claims were not taken seriously, even though we now know at the time Mook made the statement on CNN the FBI had already opened their investigation into potential Russian interference, and into possible ties between Trump’s campaign operatives and the Russian government.

Clinton campaign communications director Jennifer Palmieri recently expressed her frustration in writing, “I will never understand why he would send a letter to Congress 11 days before the election to let lawmakers know that the FBI had happened upon more emails — which they didn’t yet know the contents of — that may or may not have been relevant to Clinton, but he did not think the public should know that federal agents were also investigating Trump’s campaign.”

In the last presidential debate, Clinton herself even cited the unanimous conclusion by the intelligence community, both civilian and military, that Russian meddling in the election had indeed happened. The message was barely received.

According to data from Gallup, voters barely factored in stories about possible Russian meddling as it pertained to Trump, while overwhelmingly associating Clinton with negative media stories pertaining to her emails.

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Hillary Clinton ultimately lost the election – despite having won the popular vote by nearly three million votes– because of 80,000 voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. It is not outside the realm of plausibility to think that had the media taken the Clinton campaign’s warnings more seriously, America would have a competent, qualified president in the White House.

Instead, the president of the United States is a man who has hired his son-in-law with no previous foreign relations or political experience to broker a Middle East peace deal, insults NATO allies, conflates which country he has sent bombs to and constantly embarrasses the office of the president with his Twitter feed.

The Russian government preferred Trump in the election. The Trump campaign knew this and they even had it in writing. You don’t have to like Hillary Clinton or think she ran a good campaign to recognize that she was fleeced in the last election. After all, the only consolation she is left with now is being able to say, “I told you so.”

Supriya Dwivedi is host of The Morning Show on Toronto’s Talk Radio AM640 and a columnist for Global News.