Donald Trump has spent the week taking a pro-Putin position on Russian election hacking, then backing down in the face of immense criticism, only to take yet another pro-Putin stance on election hacking, only to back down again. It’s become clear that Trump is afraid of what Vladimir Putin might do to him, and of what the American justice system might do to him, and he therefore can’t pick a position. But this evening we’re learning that there’s ambiguity when it comes to what Trump has known about Putin all along.

The U.S. intel community informed Donald Trump in early January of 2017 that Vladimir Putin had personally ordered Russian government hackers to intervene in the 2016 election in his favor, according to a stunning new expose from the New York Times tonight. Not only has Trump known since before taking office that it was Putin, he’s privately acknowledged that it was Putin, only to then spend the next year and a half publicly insisting that it wasn’t Putin – or wasn’t even Russia. So where does this leave us?

If Trump’s press conference with Putin was already considered an act of treason against the United States, this new information further solidifies that notion. Trump didn’t just know it was Putin in the logical sense that we’ve all known it was Putin, he knew it was Putin. He saw the classified intel that proved it was Putin. Yet he chose to publicly side with Putin this week over the United States government anyway. Just wait til it’s proven that Trump knew during the election that it was Putin, because he was working with Putin.

What may stand out here the most strongly is the timing of the release of this new information. Someone involved with briefing Donald Trump on classified matters must have concluded this week that it was necessary to publicly expose Trump’s secret knowledge of the matter, and thus informed the New York Times about it. As Trump’s behavior becomes more treasonous, it appears his own people are unwilling to sit back and let him sell the United States out to Russia.



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