Story highlights David Axelrod: Putin and Trump when cornered, will deny facts and tar opponents with flagrantly false accusations and gratuitous smears

He says it's height of irony for Putin to invoke flawed Iraq intelligence to smear Trump, just as Trump used it to smear US intelligence community

David Axelrod is CNN's senior political commentator and host of the podcast "The Axe Files." He was senior adviser to President Barack Obama and chief strategist for the 2008 and 2012 Obama campaigns. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his.

(CNN) A president under siege unleashes a wholly unproven and outrageous charge and assails the US intelligence community for spreading false, politically-motivated findings.

You may think you have seen this movie before, but it happened just this week. And the president wasn't ours.

It was interesting to watch Vladimir Putin's cynical and dismissive response to the overwhelming evidence that his ally, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, had again deployed chemical weapons against his own people. Without offering a shred of proof, Putin first charged that it was Syrian rebels who had engineered the gassing of women and children as a "false flag" to implicate Assad and draw the United States to attack the Syrian regime.

By week's end, he went further, questioning whether the chemical attack had happened at all. In other words, the suggestion that Assad was behind a horrific chemical attack against women and children, the wrenching images of which the whole world has seen, was just so much "fake news."

This is the world Putin has promoted -- a world in which inconvenient truths are parried with outlandish accusations and objective facts are dismissed as politically-motivated contrivances.

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