Heather Cox Richardson - January 24, 2020 - Letters From An American

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com

"SNIP....

The White House is definitely feeling the heat. Today a BBC News story revealed that Rinaldo Nazzaro, the American founder of the neo-Nazi group The Base, which wants to destroy the US government, incite a race war, and create a white ethnostate, has been running the organization from Russia, a country with whom the president has been far too cozy and whose propaganda Giuliani and Trump supporters are echoing.

This evening, Trump read a statement in which he claimed he had always highly regarded the US Intelligence Community (this is not true; he has often attacked it and deferred to the intelligence agencies of Russia or Saudi Arabia), and said he accepted that Russia meddled in the 2016 election (although he claimed it did not affect his win). He then went off script to say other countries might have interfered, too, so the moment wasn’t perfect, but this was clearly an attempt to make it look as if the White House was backing off from the Russia-backed propaganda that Ukraine had interfered in the 2016 election rather than Russia. It was not a convincing performance on his part, I thought, and the fact he ended off script: “There was no collusion!” didn’t help.

....SNIP"