Mook: No, Obama didn't tell Hillary to concede

No? That’s not what Amie Parnes writes in her upcoming book, a story that has been percolating for more than a week without a denial. Yesterday, Hillary Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook finally disputed it when Jake Tapper mentioned it, telling CNN’s State of the Union host that he needed to do “a little fact-checking there.” Hillary had already called Trump before talking with Barack Obama, and had scheduled the speech the next morning, too.

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Er … suuuuuuuure:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vanScaLuZaA

“She made the decision to call Donald Trump,” Mook said in an interview that aired Sunday on CNN.

“She made that decision on her own, before she spoke to the president,” he continued.

“She made it because she believed and she had said during the campaign that it is important to our democracy that whoever wins, that their opponent concede the election and be supportive of them becoming president-elect and so she acted in good faith with that.”

Really? Let’s gauge this belated fact-checking with a couple of facts in the aftermath. First off, let’s recall that at the time of Hillary’s supposed resolve to concede to Trump personally, she sent John Podesta out to the stage to tell the crowd that it’s not over until it’s over. Why do that if Mook’s narrative is correct? Shortly after that speech, Hillary did concede privately to Trump, which makes it look as though someone staged an intervention.

Furthermore, as Tapper notes, the morning-after speech schedule didn’t get announced right away — and then Hillary showed up more than two hours after it was supposed to begin. That doesn’t exactly have the aroma of planning. Hillary did deliver a gracious concession at that point and asked for the nation to come together behind the new president-elect, but that apparently didn’t last long. Her campaign attorney, Marc Elias, joined the recount efforts of Jill Stein’s campaign in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, which doesn’t exactly sound like a full-throated acceptance of the election results. Furthermore, her campaign website still has volunteer forms to sign up for recounts in Wisconsin and Michigan. (Interestingly, the site doesn’t have any apparent links to get to those pages.) Why are they organizing for recounts in these states if Hillary wants to “be supportive of [Trump] becoming president-elect”?

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Mook’s “fact check” sounds more like self-serving revisionism. That’s a constant in the Clinton clique, so it’s at least keeping in character.

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