Following the lead of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump has now decided his invitation to Putin should be delayed until after the midterms, according to a statement from Trump national security advisor John Bolton.

“The president believes that the next bilateral meeting with President Putin should take place after the Russia witch hunt is over,” Bolton said Wednesday, “so we’ve agreed that it will be after the first of the year.”

Congressional Republicans are surely breathing a collective sigh of relief at the news. Fallout from Trump’s Helsinki sell out has been rippling through the GOP ever since Trump aligned himself with Putin over U.S. intelligence in front of an international audience last week. The polling is simply dreadful and Trump clearly couldn’t be trusted to avoid giving another disastrous performance just weeks before the midterms if Putin had visited the White House as Trump requested.

Of course, it was really Putin who put the kibosh on the whole thing. On Tuesday, word came via a top Kremlin aide that Putin wasn’t ready to accept Trump’s invite.

"I think it would be wise to let the dust settle and then we can discuss all these questions in a business-like way,” Yuri Ushakov said of a second Trump-Putin summit. “But not now."

One gets the sense that Putin—who doesn’t seem nearly as desperate to befriend Trump as the Donald is to befriend him—thought a hasty pre-midterm summit might not send the right message to the U.S. electorate. After all, Putin admitted last week that he preferred Trump to prevail in 2016, even though the White House omitted Putin’s response to that question from the official White House transcript and the video feed. In the meantime, Trump is trying to gaslight America about Putin’s affinity for him in tweets suggesting Russia will be trying to help Democrats win this fall (nothing could be further from the truth).

But how about Trump’s national security advisor calling the investigation into Russia’s attack on our 2016 elections a “witch hunt”? That’s pretty “special,” to borrow a term from Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats.

Bolton, a one-time Russia hawk who in 2017 called Russia’s election cyber attack “a true act of war” against the US, is now parroting Trump’s “witch hunt” paranoia despite the 33 indictments and five guilty pleas the probe has yielded.

Gee, how about a statement like: Before another summit with Russia moves forward, President Trump feels we must get to the bottom of what happened in the 2016 election. Presumably, the White House could have used the recent indictments of 12 Russian officers and NRA booster Maria Butina as a pivot point. But nope. The fact that Russia tried to (and potentially did) hijack our democracy and the vote of the American people is none of Trump’s concern.