Russian election meddling, which a whole lot of people still blame for Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016, wasn’t talked about very much until Donald Trump won. First was the narrative that the election was “hacked” — Green Party candidate Jill Stein, learning that voting machines weren’t linked to the internet, surmised instead that Russian agents sneaked into polling places with floppy disks and reprogrammed the voting machines.
Eventually, hacking became meddling, which then became Russians buying Facebook ads showing a devil-horned Clinton preparing to box Jesus and Bernie Sanders in a Speedo doing muscle poses.
There really has never been a satisfactory explanation of why the Obama administration didn’t seem to do anything about Russian meddling in the 2016 election, seeing as it happened on their watch. We learned in 2018 that Obama’s cyber chief was ordered to “stand down” against Russian cyberattacks in summer 2016.