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Former Obama White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer Mocks Recount Efforts On Twitter As Democrats Stand Divided

By Dawn Papple
Published on: 16:32 PST, Nov 26, 2016

Obama allies completely oppose the multi-state recount effort started by the Green Party’s 2016 nominee for president Jill Stein, according to a recent article in The Hill. Former Obama White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer even mocked the recount efforts on Twitter on Thursday.

President Obama may have urged Clinton to concede the election before she was ready, The Hill article claimed. “You need to concede,” Obama reportedly told Hillary Clinton as she watched the results come in from Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Clinton reportedly heeded the president’s advice and called President-elect Trump in the early hours after election night.

“Just give me the phone,” Clinton reportedly said in frustration before calling Trump. “I’m calling him.”

Though seemingly mocked by the former White House communications director, some of Clinton’s supporters are wishing she would have never taken Obama’s alleged advice, according to The Hill.

The Hill reported that one source said that the DNC doesn’t want to be affiliated with the recount efforts, but Clinton’s allies are reportedly hopeful that Stein’s efforts could end up changing the election outcome. Dan Pfeiffer clearly disagrees with that outlook and has tweeted repeatedly about the recount campaign.

Officials in the Obama administration seem to mirror the sentiments of Dan Pfeiffer’s tweets. According to the New York Times, the Obama administration believes that the Kremlin probably expected that if they hacked the elections, it would be uncovered, given all of the accusations as Election Day approached. This probably made the Kremlin choose not to hack the systems, the theory goes. Additionally, the Obama administration did not have reason to believe that the systems in question had been hacked, primarily because the machines aren’t connected to the internet, Business Insider reported. A statement from the White House said that the administration stands behind the election results and that they “accurately reflect the will of the American people.”

A senior administration official from the White House reportedly told The Guardian that the administration believes “our elections were free and fair from a cybersecurity perspective.”

Stein officially filed a recount request in Wisconsin on Friday afternoon, and recount requests in Michigan and Pennsylvania are expected in the coming week. Stein said the goal of the recount campaign is to uncover places where democracy is able to be compromised and tweeted, “Healing the country is exactly what I’m going for. We cannot heal if we don’t know where we’re broken.”

Meanwhile, Clinton supporters are hoping to flip the states in question, though the Clinton team itself says that it is participating on principle alone in order to monitor the recount process itself, according to Marc Elias of Hillary for America Counsel.

“We do so fully aware that the number of votes separating Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in the closest of these states?—?Michigan?—?well exceeds the largest margin ever overcome in a recount. But regardless of the potential to change the outcome in any of the states, we feel it is important, on principle, to ensure our campaign is legally represented in any court proceedings and represented on the ground in order to monitor the recount process itself.”

CNN reported that Elias said that the campaign’s own investigation did not uncover any evidence to indicate that there had been any hacking of voting systems.

Stein tweeted that the Green Party would request recounts in any state in which the deadline had not passed. Stein asked her Twitter followers to help her staff find the deadlines.

[Featured Image by Netroots Nation/Flickr/Cropped and resized/CC BY-SA 2.0]

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