Who Tells Trump Sweet Little Lies About Ukraine? OH, WHO THE F*CK YOU THINK?
We're gonna need to see those Trump-Putin call transcripts and interpreter notes and Secret Santa gift swaps and ALL OF IT.
The day after Donald Trump was impeached for soliciting Ukraine to announce fake investigations in order to help him in his 2020 election, and also to soothe his wounded ego over being a president who only squeaked into office in 2016 because Vladimir Putin gave him a piggyback ride and carried him across the finish line, the story just kept unfolding in the Washington Post.
Know where Trump got the CRAZY idea that Russia didn't meddle in the 2016 election, but rather Ukraine did, in order to help Hillary Clinton steal the election from herself ? Former top White House aides are pretty sure Putin personally planted it in the president's mouth.
If that sounds familiar, it is because it is the type of thing Wonkette jokes about constantly , secure in the knowledge that the Washington Post will probably eventually report that our jokes are in point of fact 100 percent accurate.
Like right now:
Almost from the moment he took office, President Trump seized on a theory that troubled his senior aides: Ukraine, he told them on many occasions, had tried to stop him from winning the White House.
After meeting privately in July 2017 with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Group of 20 summit in Hamburg, Trump grew more insistent that Ukraine worked to defeat him, according to multiple former officials familiar with his assertions.
The president's intense resistance to the assessment of U.S. intelligence agencies that Russia systematically interfered in the 2016 campaign — and the blame he cast instead on a rival country — led many of his advisers to think that Putin himself helped spur the idea of Ukraine's culpability, said the officials.
Hamburg Hamburg Hamburg ... we are racking our brain to remember what else happened at the G20 summit in Hamburg.
Is that the one where Trump and Putin had the secret dinner meeting where he crawled under the table and ended up prairie dogging up between Putin's legs like "HELLO, DADDY"? After they had already spent over two hours together in their official meeting?
Yes.
(Don't know if Trump literally crawled under the table and popped up like a whack-a-mole in the Russian president's lap, as we doubt President Old Balls can perform physical feats of strength like that.)
Is that the one where Trump literally confiscated the interpreter's notes of what had transpired between him and his (alleged) KGB handler?
Sounds like on top of whatever else they discussed, Putin was putting Kremlin propaganda conspiracy theories about Ukraine meddling in the 2016 election in our president's weak and sad and impressionable brain.
And lest you think oh, this is just former senior Trump aides doing conjectures, one of the Post 's sources puts a fine point on it:
One former senior White House official said Trump even stated so explicitly at one point, saying he knew Ukraine was the real culprit because "Putin told me."
Two other former officials said the senior White House official described Trump's comment to them.
Who does Trump believe? Not the intelligence community. Not our allies. He, the compromised dumbfuck, believes Putin.
By the way, the Post has FIFTEEN sources on this. Here's one of them:
"He would say: 'This is ridiculous. Everyone knows I won the election. The greatest election in the world. The Russians didn't do anything. The Ukrainians tried to do something,' " one former official said.
Tracing The Conspiracy Theory From Putin's Mouth Into Donald Trump's Heart
If you watched all 15,672 hours of impeachment testimony like a good little American, you remember that several times, Democratic lawyer Daniel Goldman showed a quote from a press conference Putin gave with Hungarian shithole dictator Viktor Orbán earlier in 2017, before that Hamburg G20 meeting, where Putin appeared to publicly seed the Kremlin Ukraine conspiracy theories now endorsed by Trump and half the GOP:
PUTIN: As we all know [AS WE ALL KNOW - Ed.] during the presidential campaign in the United States, the Ukrainian government adopted a unilateral position in favour of one candidate. More than that, certain oligarchs, certainly with the approval of the political leadership, funded this candidate, or female candidate to be precise.
Goldman showed this quote while witnesses like Fiona Hill confirmed what the intelligence community has explained to stubborn Republican senators, which is that "UKRAINE IS THE REAL COLLUSION!11!1!1!!1!!" is straight-up Russian propaganda from the dark asshole of the Kremlin. (Now-imprisoned Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort, who worked for pro-Russia oligarchs in Ukraine, was spreading "UKRAINE DID IT" conspiracy theories about the DNC hacking of the 2016 election during the 2016 election , according to Robert Mueller's memos.)
And months after the Putin/Orbán press conference, in the summer of 2017, Putin apparently told DumbDumb McOld this fake news propaganda, in order to absolve himself and his rogue country of responsibility for what it did to America, and obviously to ameliorate DumbDumb McOld's hurt feelings over being an entirely illegitimate president.
A year later, in the summer of 2018, Trump and Putin met in Helsink i and gave a press conference, where Trump stood next to Putin like a submissive dog and dutifully yapped some more Kremlin propaganda about how he believes Putin, and also about how he really wants to see the DNC server -- you know, the one that according to his conspiracy theories was stolen by a Ukrainian man from a Ukrainian company (Crowdstrike is American and its co-founder is Russian-American ) and buried in Ukraine's backyard, which he explained to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in July of 2019, not long after he said, "I WOULD LIKE YOU TO DO US A FAVOR THOUGH."
Here's Trump in Helsinki with Putin in 2018:
TRUMP: My people came to me, Dan Coats came to me and some others, they said they think it's Russia. I have President Putin; he just said it's not Russia.
I will say this: I don't see any reason why it would be. But I really do want to see the server.
THE SERVER. Wanna take bets on whether Vlad also told Trump about THE SERVER?
The Washington Post 's new reporting tells us a bit more about what happened just after that meeting:
[A]fter returning to Washington, Trump continued to press the Ukraine theory with more frequency, former officials said. They worried that his meeting with Putin had again influenced his thinking.
We bet.
Show Us The Damn Bin Laden Server! (Not The Parts With The State Secrets, Just The Trump Treason!)
We joke all the time about what happens in Trump and Putin's secret meetings and secret phone calls and secret Santa gift swaps, because we assume it's a threat to national security, and that Putin is either giving him instructions or Trump is leaking classified secrets to Putin or Putin is filling Trump's head with propaganda. We make those jokes because they're probably true . And our suspicions got a lot closer to being confirmed when we found out about the secret server that's intended for state secrets like the details of the bin Laden raid, but in the Trump era seems more like a repository for Impeachy the Clown's various treasons.
Very Serious Journalists often wonder aloud, "Where does he get this bad information?" Meanwhile we're over here screaming PUTIN HE FUCKING GETS IT FROM PUTIN IT'S ALWAYS PUTIN! Or, you know, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov . Or some Russian named Igor, who delivers him secret late night Big Macs at the White House.
Now we know that at least some of Trump's batshit conspiracy theories about Ukraine, which led him to extort that nation's new president while withholding military aid they needed for their hot war with Russia, for which he has now been impeached, came directly from Putin, according to the former aides who talked to the Washington Post .
We're gonna need to see alllllllll the interpreter notes, if they still exist, as well as the call logs from the bin Laden server. So get to it, White House leakers. Put them on the internet. Put them in the Washington Post . PUT THEM IN OUR CHRISTMAS STOCKING.
American national security is literally depending on you.
[ Washington Post ]
Follow Evan Hurst on Twitter RIGHT HERE, DO IT RIGHT HERE!
Wonkette is fully funded by readers like YOU. If you love Wonkette, SUPPORT WONKETTE FINANCIALLY.
The Russians must have file cabinets full of compromat on Benedict Donald.
Since,reportedly, there are white house staffers who piece together all the papers Trump tears up and tosses in the trash, presumably someone collected the interpreter's notes also too, waterlogged and shitstained though they might be.