yookay this is creepy-- #TrumpKnew cover of Time mag........

Link to tweet

Trump Wanted a Summit With Putin. He Got Way More Than He Bargained For



http://time.com/5342747/donald-trump-vladimir-putin-summit/?utm_medium=social&xid=time_socialflow_twitter&utm_campaign=time&utm_source=twitter.com
Brian Bennett
6:25 AM ET

'Who do you believe?'

It was a simple question, asked of President Trump by a seasoned reporter, but it sent a jolt through the assembled media at the July 16 press conference held at an ornate palace in Helsinki. Vladimir Putin had just denied again that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. America's Justice Department, intelligence community and both chambers of Congress have concluded, definitively, that the Kremlin had done it. Who did Trump trust more?

This was the moment for the President to deliver a forceful rebuke to America's long-standing adversary. Instead, Trump replied: "I have confidence in both parties," he said. "I have great confidence in my intelligence people, but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today."


The founders of the United States gave future Presidents just one grave set of instructions, enshrined in Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution. Before assuming the office, the President-elect must swear to "preserve, protect and defend" the Constitution and "faithfully" execute the duties of the office. Russia's 2016 attack had been designed, first and foremost, to undermine faith in American democracy at home and abroad. There could hardly be a more direct call for the President to be true to that oath. On the dais in Helsinki, Trump wasn't up to the task.

The government he leads had tried to prepare him. Days before the summit, Trump had been briefed in person by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein on the details of an indictment against 12 officers of Russia's military intelligence services who had executed key elements of the 2016 attack. The charges, compiled by special counsel Robert Mueller and released to the public on July 13, were meticulous in their evidence, damning in their conclusions and based at least in part on deep penetration of Russia's intelligence services by their American counterparts. Even the Russians seemed stunned, not so much by the revelations themselves as by Trump's unwillingness to stand by them. "Whenever a head of state does not trust his own intelligence agencies," retired KGB general Vladimir Rubanov tells TIME, "that's a big problem for the country where that happens."

It was only the latest offense. The U.S. recently expelled 60 Russian spies in retaliation for Moscow's alleged nerve-agent attack against a former Russian spy and his daughter in England. U.S. Homeland Security officials and members of Congress are scrambling to defend the 2018 midterm elections against what they report are continued Russian efforts to undermine American democracy and its citizens' faith in the ballot box. And around the world, the U.S. and Russia are in a tense standoff, from the airspace near Alaska, where Russian bombers regularly test American readiness to counter an attack, to the borders of Ukraine, to the battlefields of Syria, where Russian mercenaries attacked a U.S. special-forces base last February.

In addition to calling Putin's denials "powerful," Trump praised the Russian as a "good competitor" and called America itself "foolish" for allowing the relationship between the two countries to deteriorate. He welcomed the prospect of working with Russia in Syria and hailed Putin's offer to cooperate with the Mueller probe in exchange for helping to investigate the British investor Bill Browder as "an incredible offer."...................