@maddow tonight featured one of her most important stories, ever. Captioned "Puppet Puppet," you MUST watch it (B bloc) if you didn't see it live. I consider myself a pretty close student of U.S. foreign policy, but knew NOTHING about the material she presented.
It left me shaken. She laid out 3 instances in which Trump himself, or Trump officials, have articulated foreign policy concerns that are (a) completely off the wall in terms of any political opinion in this country (in Rachel's terms, they "don't exist in nature" in the U.S.),
and (b) traceable directly to (and *only* to) Russian military intelligence. The first instance, in the first weeks after inauguration, was an administration request for intel agencies to report on Polish military incursions into Belarus.
There never were such incursions, or preparations for such incursions, but the Kremlin was just then beaming exactly such disinformation at Belarus (to frighten them into closer ties w/ Russia). The ONLY people in the world then pushing that line were the Russian GRU.
The second instance linked Trump's very odd on air comment abt Montenegro joining NATO (weirdly commenting on how warlike the 'very strong' Montenegrans are), and his shoving aside of the Montenegran PM at Trump's first NATO summit, with Russia's attempted coup (including the
planned assassination of the PM) in Montenegro. The coup was foiled only months after Trump made his comments. The 3rd case linked Trump's comments y'day abt. Russia having been right to invade Afghanistan (b/c "terrorists were coming into Russia" from Afghanistan)
w/ the planned intro *next month* of a bill in the Russian Duma aimed at 'rehabilitating' the legacy of Russia's Afghan misadventure. The bill makes the identical claim abt Russia having been provoked by Afghan terrorists. Until now, no one in Russia has even attempted to make
this baseless claim. Rachel's point: these are obscure foreign policy issues about which it is, in the first place, beyond strange that this ignorant POTUS would ever have heard of them, let alone develop opinions about them.
And, second, the only possible source for Trump's awareness of these issues, and ability to articulate the particular positions he's taken (which NO ONE in the U.S. has EVER voiced), is the Kremlin itself. As Rachel asked: who is piping these views into Trump's ear ?
Bottom line: persuasive additional evidence that Trump is, literally, an active Russian agent or asset, in close communication (either by phone w/ Putin or otherwise) with Russian 'handlers.'
These cases come on top of the change in the RNC's platform plank on Ukraine, the efforts to lift sanctions on Russia, the very strange volte face on Syria and many other matters which are most readily explained by accepting that Putin 'owns' Trump.
