The Obama administration has been front and center in a campaign to delegitimize the election of Donald Trump. This is inarguably a singular act in the history of the republic. Never before has an outgoing president used the power of his administration to prop up a malicious hoax that the winner of an election won due to a foreign power selecting him. As we’ve pointed out several times Russian attempts to interfere with our election were not unknown and the administration only became interested in those efforts once it was clear Hillary Clinton was not going to be the next president (see here | here | here | here).

As we are learning now, a lot of people were aware of what the Russians were doing and tried to do something:

The White House opposed a Republican-led push earlier this year to create an executive-branch task force to battle Russia’s covert information operations, according to a document obtained by POLITICO.

Sen. Tom Cotton, a leading GOP defense hawk who has long urged President Barack Obama to take a harder line on Russia, sought to force the White House to create a panel with representatives from a number of government agencies to counter Russian efforts “to exert covert influence,” including by exposing Russian “falsehoods, agents of influence, corruption, human rights abuses, terrorism, and assassinations.”

But the administration rejected the call, saying in a letter to Congress that hasn’t been released publicly that the panel would duplicate existing efforts to battle Russian influence operations — an argument Cotton rejects.

His proposed task force drew bipartisan support as part of a larger intelligence authorization bill that passed the House but never got a floor vote in the Senate. The panel would not have been set up in time to have had an impact on Russia’s role in last month’s presidential election — even if the intelligence bill had become law. But the Arkansas senator said in an interview the White House’s dismissal of his proposal is symptomatic of the administration’s lax pre-election attitude toward Russia.

This is exactly right. And the question we must ask is why the administration did this? The answer is simple.

For eight years the Obama administration has chased three will-o-the-wisps in foreign policy. The first is the idea that radical Islam could be debated and bartered out of existence. By being obsequious in our kowtowing to Muslims of all stripes and repeating our own shahada of “Radical Islam is not really Islam,” we could move Islamic thought from the 8th Century to the 21st Century overnight. The second was that a state sponsor of terror would become a force for stability in the Middle East if only we were nice to them and gave them a nuke. That is core of our Iran policy. And finally, that Russia became a bad actor in Europe only because George Bush was real mean to them and expanded NATO and if we just give them what they want, they will be nice. Enter Hillary Clinton’s “Russian reset.” Under Hillary and her successors we have let Russia run amok in Europe (while the Clinton Foundation amassed tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in Russian contributions but perish the thought of a quid pro quo).

In fact, without Russia, the Obama administration would have had no foreign policy whatsoever.

Who acted at the “honest broker” between the US and the Iranian regime during the nuclear talks? Russia.

Who is our “partner” in fighting Isis? Russia.

So the reason why Obama declined Tom Cotton’s suggestion is pretty simple. Obama knew about Russian meddling and he didn’t care because he needed Russian assistance in every one of his major foreign policy initiatives. He also didn’t care because he knew that whatever the Russians did wouldn’t have a lot (and by “a lot” I actually mean “any”) impact because of the size of the United States and the diversity of news sources in our country and all reasonable people knew Donald Trump wouldn’t win.

In fact, I will even contend that he allowed the Russians to do what they did BECAUSE he knew Hillary Clinton was going to win and he was sure that he could tar the entire GOP with a Election Trutherism once Trump started claiming the elections were rigged after he lost.

Obama knew what the Russians were doing. He was warned by his own administration and by Congress. He let it continue because it was to his advantage to do so. If Hillary’s fanbois want to blame the Russians, they really should point their fingers at Obama.