In the midst of all the controversy surrounding Republican members of congress spreading Russia’s debunked conspiracy theory that it was Ukraine who meddled in our 2016 elections, a bombshell Washington Post piece now says President Trump actually told one of his aides that it was Putin himself who told him about Ukraine meddling in our 2016 elections.

According to the Washington Post piece, White House officials have been worried about President Trump’s insistence that it was Ukraine, not Russia who meddled in our 2016 elections and have long suspected that Russia’s President Vladimir Putin may have planted the idea in Trump’s mind. This was always their suspicion but they had no tangible evidence to prove it. However, according to the WaPo piece, their suspicion became reality when Trump, questioned about why he held on to the strange belief that Ukraine meddled in our elections, explicitly told one White House official, “Putin told me.” The shocked White House official reportedly shared this conversation with his/her peers.

Needless to say, this bombshell revelation raises a whole host of national security questions given the fact that Trump has repeatedly denigrated U.S. Intel officials as being unreliable because their “intelligence” erroneously led us to war with Iraq—a plausible argument that reasonable people can reasonably disagree about. Trump has repeated this argument to suggest that likewise, we should not believe everything we hear from U.S. intelligence agencies re Russia and Ukraine.

The troubling revelation in this Washington Post piece however will blow a huge hole in Trump’s argument because it demonstrates that he took Vladimir Putin’s word over that of U.S. intelligence officials regarding Ukraine. In other words, a lot of people who were were inclined to entertain Trump’s plausible skepticism of U.S. intelligence officials, will have a totally different reaction when they find out that it was Putin himself, who fed Trump this narrative.

This bombshell Washington Post piece also raises a lot of questions about Republican members of congress who have echoed Trump’s accusation of Ukraine. Have these Republican members of congress known all along that Putin said that to Trump directly? If so, their arguments about Ukraine meddling in our elections take a whole new turn and opens them up to accusations of knowingly spreading Putin’s propaganda.

Bottom line folks, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was spot on when she recently pointed out that with Trump, “All roads lead to Putin.” This particular WaPo bombshell however raises the stakes dramatically because it leads to the inevitable question; “What else is Trump doing because Putin told him so?” If the accounts in this WaPo piece hold up, and there’s no reason to believe that they won’t, then Democrats and the mainstream media must actively pursue this question and insist that Trump release the transcripts/notes of all his meetings/phone calls with Vladimir Putin.

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