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President Trump unleashed a series of tweets Monday in which he appeared to place the blame for Russian meddling in U.S. politics onto former President Obama.

Trump, who has a long history of deflecting criticism from himself to others, seemed to be trying to redefine what it means to collude or obstruct as he pushed back against an investigation into whether Trump's own team colluded with Russian officials during the campaign and transition.

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Wayne Fields, a Washington University professor who has studied political rhetoric, said Trump appeared to be co-opting terms like "collusion" and "obstruction" as part of a larger strategy to "invalidate" some of the arguments made against him.

"You take words and you do everything you can to make them meaningless," Fields said. "You take any kind of precision out of public discourse so it can't be used against you."

Peter Henning, a law professor at Wayne State University in Detroit who has written about public corruption, said Trump appeared to be taking the term "obstruction," which means impeding an investigation, and applying it to a decision by his predecessor not to pursue an investigation as vigorously as possible.

"Inaction is not an obstruction, but of course it has some potency as a political attack," Henning said.

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Asked about the comments, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer told reporters there were "some serious questions" about what the Obama administration "did or did not do in terms of acting" after evidence of Russian meddling surfaced during the campaign.

"Obviously, I don't have all the understanding of what they knew or when they knew it, but there does seem to be a bit of hypocrisy in terms of what they didn't clearly do if they truly believe all of this was happening," Spicer said. "If they did know all this, then they clearly do know that there wasn't a collusion."

Trump resumed the attack Monday night in a tweet that cited Fox News.

Trump appeared to refer to a report that airedMonday night on Fox News' "The Five" under the banner, "Bombshell: In 2016, Obama dismissed idea that anyone could rig an American election."

The segmentrecapped the Washington Post article and aired comments from Democrats critical ofthe Obama administration's reported response to Russia's meddling.

The episode then showed a clip of Obama speaking in October at a Rose Garden news conference, where he rebuked then-candidate Trump for sowing suspicion about the integrity of America's presidential vote.

"There is no serious person out there who would suggest somehow that you could even rig America's elections, in part because they're so decentralized and the number of votes involved," Obama said then. "There's no evidence that that has happened in the past or that there are instances in which that will happen this time, and so I would invite Mr. Trump to stop whining and go try to make his case to get votes."

Trump's last tweet came less than an hour after the White House issued a stern warning to Syrian President Bashar Assad, as it claimed to have identified "potential" evidence that Syria was preparing for another chemical weapons attack.

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In tweets on Russian meddling, Trump defends himself, attacks Obama and seeks to redefine 'obstruction' - Los Angeles Times