Trolled by a CNBC reporter on whether President Donald Trump is "going to accept Russian help in the 2020 election," White House deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley initially did not "understand the question," before pointing the finger back at former President Barack Obama's inaction on Russian election meddling.
"We're the ones that have been tough on Russia – Barack Obama, clearly, hasn't and this report exposes that," Gidley told reporters outside the White House on Tuesday.
The question came from CNBC's Eamon Javers, who asked the last question(s) of a four-minute news conference with the White House's No. 2 spokesman.
"Do have any reason to believe President Trump will accept Russian help in the 2020 election?" Javers shouted amid a media scrum.
"Accept Russian help?" Gidley responded. "I don't understand the question."
"Does he have a message to the Russians in the wake of the Mueller report?" Javers followed up.
"Look, he's already denounced, multiple times, Russian involvement," Gidley said. "This report proves we knew about this in 2014. Barack Obama did nothing. We're already coordinating at the state and local level to ensure this doesn't happen again. We've developed rapid response teams with DHS to prevent this in real time.
"In addition to that, we're already running tests to see if the election could be hacked and how we would actually work to stop that.
"Things the Barack Obama administration did not do and completely ignored. And we now know why: He thought Hillary Clinton would, in fact, win the election."