From Calvin Freiburger:

Who saw this coming? Everyone but the mainstream media.

We knew that President Donald Trump’s first official meeting with Russia’s Vladimir Putin would be irresistible for the press to pass up as grist for the ongoing conspiracy theory that Trump is a Russian stooge, or saboteur, or something (because apparently Putin would rather see America led by Trump than by the candidate that gave Russia a reset button).

Anyway, the specific meme the press seized upon, the Daily Caller reports, was that Trump would forego the opportunity to press Putin on any election interference Russia may have engaged in:

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“Some early reports that sound like he doesn’t intend to [bring up meddling],” CNN’s Susan Hennessey guessed. “The idea that at the same moment or early before he would choose to, once again, raise these issues on his Twitter feed really just puts sort of the starkness and sort of bizarreness of his to not bring this up to President Putin.”

Well, the meeting has come and gone. How did that prediction pan out?

However, shortly after Trump’s meeting with Putin, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson indicated that Trump pressed Putin on election interference multiple times and that it was the first topic raised in the meeting.

CNBC has more:

Putin again denied trying to influence the election, which top U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded he personally ordered. Tillerson called Moscow’s attempts to affect the election a “hindrance in the ability of us to move the U.S.-Russia relationship forward.” Trump, however, wanted to talk about how the countries “go forward” rather than “spending a lot of time having a disagreement” over election interference, Tillerson added. “Everybody knows we have a disagreement,” he said. Lavrov told reporters that Trump accepted Putin’s assurances that Russia did not interfere in the election, though the White House later disputed that to NBC News.

Of course Russia is going to claim Trump blindly believed them. In other news, water is wet.

What’s astounding about the persistence of this narrative isn’t just the complete absence of evidence. No, the real irony is that this comes while Trump is working to get to the bottom of actual election interference — vote fraud — and liberals are the ones hysterically and hypocritically opposing his efforts.

Yep, it’s a real stumper why nobody people are turning off CNN in droves…