Trump’s Intelligence War Is Also an Election Story
“I believe him.”
It was November 2017, after a meeting with Vladimir Putin in Vietnam, and Donald Trump was telling reporters he was convinced by the Russian president’s denials about interfering in the 2016 election. “He said he didn’t meddle,” Trump said. “And I believe, I really believe, that when he tells me that, he means it.”
U.S. intelligence agencies, of course, had concluded the opposite. Shortly before Trump’s inauguration, the office of the country’s top intelligence official published a report saying that not only had Putin ordered an influence campaign aimed at the 2016 election—he did so in part to help Trump win.
From the start of his presidency, Trump has pummeled away at that finding—sending flurries of tweets, sidelining officials who wouldn’t toe his line—in an effort to cloud and undermine it. As Special Counsel Robert Mueller highlighted the magnitude of Russia’s 2016 efforts, Trump stood beside Putin in cast doubt on Moscow’s culpability. He continued to muddy the waters amid warnings about Russian meddling in new elections in 2018 and 2020, Moscow’s involvement and even doubling down on a theory, itself the of Russian disinformation, that Ukraine interfered in 2016 to help Hillary Clinton.
