Trump Ukraine Quotes

You know what Trump is?’ ‘Tell me.’ ‘He’s Putin’s shithouse cleaner. He does everything for little Vladi that little Vladi can’t do for himself: pisses on European unity, pisses on human rights, pisses on NATO. Assures us that Crimea and Ukraine belong to the Holy Russian Empire, the Middle East belongs to the Jews and the Saudis, and to hell with the world order.

For many Europeans and Americans, events in the 2010s—the rise of antidemocratic politics, the Russian turn against Europe and invasion of Ukraine, the Brexit referendum, the Trump election—came as a surprise.

It was the job of Trump’s lawyer to tell him not to do it. But that’s not what Giuliani did. To the contrary, Trump sent Giuliani to Ukraine, and he went. Together, the two men didn’t just advocate for collusion with Ukraine; they executed it.

Just as in the Trump-Giuliani Ukraine conspiracy, we saw a ruthless, single-minded obsession with staying in power; a manifest lack of moral values, shame, and civility; and a stunning disregard of and disrespect for facts, truth, and expertise.

From the day he declared his candidacy, through the Russia scandal and his endless solicitude toward Vladimir Putin, and on into his cruel manipulation of the struggling democracy in Ukraine, Trump didn’t give a shit about anyone or anything but himself.

The White House released the military aid to Ukraine after allegations of the link to the Biden investigation became public. In other words, the Trump administration released the aid only because it was caught linking the aid to the quest for political dirt.

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine isn’t a staring contest. It’s a land grab, the first of this scale since World War II. But when asked about it, instead of walking up to the plate and swinging at the softball (crack! more sanctions!), Drumpf put down his bat, walked down the third-base line, and kissed the opposing team’s head coach.

Instead, Giuliani pressed ahead, with Trump’s encouragement, to begin a full-scale investigation about Joe and Hunter Biden in Ukraine. If Giuliani had done anything else, Donald Trump would not have been impeached. For this reason, Giuliani’s work must rank among the most disastrous pieces of advocacy in the history of American lawyering.

The threat continues. The outcome now is in the hands of the American people and our system of justice. The methods Donald Trump is using to undermine our democracy are not unique to him. I saw authoritarian leaders use many of these same tactics in Eastern Europe, Russia, Ukraine, and across the Middle East when I was working for the US State Department. History

You can’t just go and just flip a switch and change the election,” Rosen responded. “I don’t expect you to do that,” Trump said. “Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen.”[17] Just say it was corrupt. Even though Rosen had told him there was no evidence that it was. Much as with his campaign to get Ukraine to undermine Joe Biden, Trump was not looking for corruption, just someone to say there was so he could weaponize it.

When I saw Mr. Trump lean over and say to Mr. Putin, it’s a great honor to meet you, and this is Mr. Putin who assaulted one of the foundational pillars of our democracy, our electoral system, that invaded Ukraine, annexed Crimea, that has suppressed and repressed political opponents in Russia and has caused the deaths of many of them, to say up front, person who supposedly knows the art of the deal, I thought it was a very, very bad negotiating tactic, and I felt as though it was not the honorable thing to say,” Brennan told national security professionals gathered a couple weeks later at the Aspen Security Forum.

This act of whistleblowing was not like other acts of whistleblowing. Historically, whistleblowers reveal abuse of power that is surprising and shocking to the public. The Trump-Ukraine story was shocking but in no way surprising: it was in character, and in keeping with a pattern of actions. The incident that the whistleblower chose to report was not the worst thing that Trump had done. Installing his daughter and her husband in the White House was worse. Inciting violence was worse. Unleashing war on immigrants was worse. Enabling murderous dictators the world over was worse. The two realities of Trump’s America—democratic and autocratic—collided daily in the impeachment hearings. In one reality, Congress was following due process to investigate and potentially remove from office a president who had abused power. In the other reality, the proceedings were a challenge to Trump’s legitimate autocratic power. The realities clashed but still did not overlap: to any participant or viewer on one side of the divide, anything the other side said only reaffirmed their reality. The realities were also asymmetrical: an autocratic attempt is a crisis, but the logic and language of impeachment proceedings is the logic and language of normal politics, of vote counting and procedure. If it had succeeded in removing Trump from office, it would have constituted a triumph of institutions over the autocratic attempt. It did not. The impeachment proceedings became merely a part of the historical record, a record of only a small part of the abuse that is Trumpism.

I visited with American diplomats at the U.S. embassy just before they became entangled in the impeachment of President Donald Trump. On the day I visited, they were overwhelmed by Russia’s latest disinformation campaign: Russian trolls had been inundating Facebook pages frequented by young Ukrainian mothers with anti-vaccination propaganda. This, as the country reeled from the worst measles outbreak in modern history. Ukraine now had one of the lowest vaccination rates in the world and the Kremlin was capitalizing on the chaos. Ukraine’s outbreak was already spreading back to the States, where Russian trolls were now pushing anti-vaxxer memes on Americans. American officials seemed at a loss for how to contain it. (And they were no better prepared when, one year later, Russians seized on the pandemic to push conspiracy theories that Covid-19 was an American-made bioweapon, or a sinister plot by Bill Gates to profit off vaccines.) There seemed no bottom to the lengths Russia was willing to go to divide and conquer.

Here we must ask a critical question: what does it mean when American media outlets deliberately censor and silence anything related to Palestine, the voices of war atrocities in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Syria, while at the same time glorifying the Ukraine war or presumably covering Black Lives Matter or police brutality against black people? Can we believe that such media has good intentions? Can we believe that they really care about Black people, or are they more interested in deepening the divide in the society? I personally find this suspicious and ill intentioned. I believe the purpose here is not to support any Black causes or push for meaningful changes, but rather, exploiting the already existing and strong structural racism and white supremacy weaved into the fabric of the entire society to make people even more alienated from each other. Mistaken are those who think that “divide and conquer” is only practiced in remote places and in so-called “third world” countries. There are many ways to divide and conquer, but we need to have the right critical tools to detect and fight against them, as is the case here. [From “The Trump Age: Critical Questions” published on CounterPunch on June 23, 2023]

On Saturday, March 19, 2016, at 4:34 A.M., John Podesta, the Hillary Clinton campaign chairman, received what looked like an email from Google about his personal Gmail account. “Hi John Someone just used your password to try to sign in to your Google Account,” read the email from “the Gmail Team.” It noted that the attempted intrusion had come from an IP address in Ukraine. The email went on: “Google stopped this sign-in attempt. You should change your password immediately.” The Gmail Team helpfully included a link to a site where Podesta could make the recommended password change. That morning, Podesta forwarded the email to his chief of staff, Sara Latham, who then sent it along to Charles Delavan, a young IT staffer at the Clinton campaign. At 9:54 AM that morning, Delavan replied, “This is a legitimate email. John needs to change his password immediately, and ensure that two-factor authentication is turned on his account… It is absolutely imperative that this is done ASAP.” Delavan later asserted to colleagues that he had committed a typo. He had meant to write that “this is not a legitimate email.” Not everybody on the Clinton campaign would believe him. But Delavan had an argument in his favor. In his response to Latham, he had included the genuine link Podesta needed to use to change his password. Yet for some reason Podesta clicked on the link in the phony email and used a bogus site to create a new password. The Russians now had the keys to his emails and access to the most private messages of Clinton World going back years.

Chalupa’s actions appear to show that she was simultaneously working on behalf of a foreign government, Ukraine, and on behalf of the DNC and Clinton campaign, in an effort to influence not only the US voting population but US government officials.

Without Russia there wouldn’t have been a war in 2014. There would undoubtedly have been tension between the central government in Kiev and its predominantly Russian eastern regions—a political dispute about autonomy, devolved power, the multiple failures of the Ukrainian state, and the status of the Russian language. But Ukraine wouldn’t have fallen apart. Fewer people would have died.

For sure, the fault lines in Ukraine—between Catholic west and Orthodox east, between those looking to Europe and those nostalgic for the lost Soviet universe—existed before Manafort arrived on the scene. The charge against Manafort is that he cynically exploited these divisions for short-term electoral gain, without much caring about the consequences. These were, in the end, catastrophic.

Nayyem described the American as “deeply cynical.” “He didn’t think about the history or about the people of Ukraine. He treated Ukraine as if he was playing a computer game, dividing the country into three parts, making these clashes.

25 yrs I was registered Democrat. 1st Time I voted for Hillary but when I watch the movie called "13 Hours" I voted for Trump because I thought Hillary will be very dangers for our country! During the four years watching our president being attacked from the democrat's and their media, and watching conservatives being censor. That open my eyes more! I learned that our country is getting destroyed with in! I rather read mean Tweets all day, and pay low prices than watching people killed in Ukraine, and paying high prices!

That is not to say there were not negative consequences to the Trump era. In 2018, according to the Ronald Reagan Institute, 70 percent of Americans had “a great deal of trust and confidence” in the military. By the end of Trump’s term the number had fallen to 56 percent. At the same time, Trump’s decision to withhold military aid from Ukraine while providing political cover for Vladimir Putin’s aggression against it, and seeking to weaken NATO, looks very different and much more reckless in light of Russia’s February 2022 attack on its neighbor. But as each chapter of this book illustrates, the principled, constitutionally based resistance Trump encountered from within his administration to his most dangerous ideas limited the negative consequences of his recklessness.

Donald Trump Jr. had met with Kremlin officials and other Russian nationals who had offered compromising information on Clinton, which Trump Jr. was eager to accept. As a candidate, Trump had also weakened the Republican Party position on defending Ukraine from Russia, all while pursuing a billion-dollar deal to establish a Trump Tower in Moscow.

LIKE ALL AMERICANS, I was shocked by what happened on January 6. But it was, at the same time, deeply familiar. President Trump’s defiance after losing the 2020 election reminded me of other presidents, from Nicolás Maduro, who in the months before Venezuela’s 2015 election declared he would not relinquish his post no matter the outcome, to Laurent Gbagbo, who refused to concede after Ivory Coast’s 2010 election because he claimed it was stolen. Venezuela slid toward authoritarianism; the Ivory Coast descended into civil war. A part of me did not want to accept the implications of what I was seeing. I thought of Daris, from Sarajevo, who, even years later, still struggled to understand how the people of his multicultural, vibrant country had turned so violently on one another. This is America, I thought. We are known for our tolerance and our veneration of democracy. But this is where political science, with its structured approach to analyzing history as it unfolds, can be so helpful. No one wants to believe that their beloved democracy is in decline, or headed toward war; the decay is often so incremental that people often fail to notice or understand it, even as they’re experiencing it. If you were an analyst in a foreign country looking at events in America—the same way you’d look at events in Ukraine or the Ivory Coast or Venezuela—you would go down a checklist, assessing each of the conditions that make civil war likely. And what you would find is that the United States, a democracy founded more than two centuries ago, has entered dangerous territory.

Within days, Trump admitted that on July 25 he had called the new president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, to enlist his help against former vice president Joe Biden, who was beating Trump in most polls going into the 2020 election season. Zelensky was desperate for the money Congress had approved to help his country fight Russian-backed separatists in the regions Russia had occupied after the 2014 invasion, but Trump indicated he would release the money only after Zelensky announced an investigation into the actions of Biden’s son Hunter during his time on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma.

Take a look at all the things that I’ve done,” Trump declared. “Obama sent them pillows. I sent them tank-busters.” President Obama had provided Ukraine with more than $120 million in security assistance but refused to send lethal weapons. Trump was the first president to approve the sale of U.S. lethal weapons to Ukraine, including Javelin antitank missiles.

the framework of the conflict between former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Russian President Vladimir Putin, angered by U.S. intrusion in his wars in Georgia, Syria, Ukraine, the military seizure of Crimea, and pressures on NATO allies Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania, Putin may be unleashing Trump’s challenge as a way to exact revenge on the United States. Putin

Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham were staunch advocates of arming the government of Ukraine in their fight with Russian separatists and Putin. During the Republican National Convention, the party platform committee proposed language to the effect that Ukraine needed U.S. weapons and NATO support to defend itself, in support of a long-held Republican position. Carter Page, now on the Trump campaign team, used to work in the Merrill Lynch’s Moscow office, has personal investments in Gazprom, a Russian state oil conglomerate. He told Bloomberg that his investments have been hurt by the sanctions policy against Russia over Ukraine.39 He has characterized the U.S. policy toward Russia as chattel slavery.

Just days from the second anniversary of Pastor Saeed’s incarceration, President Obama gave a major speech to the United Nations General Assembly. He focused on issues such as Ebola, ISIL militants in Iraq and the Russian invasion of Ukraine—all crises worthy of the attention of the American president and the United Nations. But entirely absent from his remarks was the grim threat posed to the United States and our allies by a nuclear-armed Iran. In the very few words he devoted to the subject of Iran, President Obama offered the Iranians the “opportunity” to resolve the nuclear issue by "assuring the world" that their program is "peaceful.” There was no mention of the many outright lies the Iranians have told about their program over the years. There

Greece, maneuvering for debt relief, is flirting treacherously with Moscow. Recession-hit economies such as Italy seem to believe business as normal with Russia trumps calls for solidarity over Ukraine.

During the call, Trump threatened to withhold aid to Ukraine unless Zelensky provided damaging information on Hunter Biden, the son of Vice President Joe Biden.

The first, financial crash, matches Americans’ worries about inadequate, insecure, and unfair income growth. These first arose in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis in 2008. The second, internal conflict, matches their worries about violent partisanship and the failure of democracy. These came to full awareness following Trump’s 2016 victory. The third, external conflict, matches their worries about foreign aggressor nations. These have been rising since the mid-2010s and jumped to full-threat status with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

FAKE NEWS People say that heretofore I kept Black tenants from my door Using legal trickery, But fake news doesn’t bother me. They say that falsifying facts is How I skirted all my taxes. People call it larceny, But fake news doesn’t bother me. Constantly I’m found at fault, Charged with sexual assault, Harassment, and adultery, But fake news doesn’t bother me. Starving students, people say, Had their futures ripped away By Dumpty University, But fake news doesn’t bother me. They smear me with the vilest things Like payoffs for my casual flings From the campaign treasury, But fake news doesn’t bother me. People say I monetize All my presidential ties, Boosting my prosperity, But fake news doesn’t bother me. They say my meddling in Ukraine Left an ignominious stain Tantamount to treachery, But fake news doesn’t bother me. They say in days coronaviral I propelled our downward spiral Through my imbecility, But fake news doesn’t bother me. Notwithstanding crimes like these, I’ll continue as I please. Fake news doesn’t bother me. I’ll just rewrite history. Among other allegations, Donald Trump is said to have discriminated against African Americans as a New York real estate developer; committed tax fraud to avoid paying income tax on $50 million; engaged in sexual misconduct toward more than twenty-five women; endorsed Trump University’s fraudulent scheme to target the uneducated and the elderly; used the power of his office to attempt blackmail in Ukraine; and mishandled the government’s early response to the coronavirus pandemic.

On September 1, Sondland made it clear to the Ukrainians that unless they made an explicit promise to pursue the Burisma investigation—into the alleged ties between Joe Biden’s son Hunter and the energy company Burisma in Ukraine—the funds would not be released. That same day, Taylor told Kent that Sondland had been as explicit in his communications with the Ukrainians as to say that Trump wanted Zelenskyy at a microphone voicing the words “investigations,” “Biden,” and “Clinton.” The Washington Post would report the shakedown attempt four days later, on September 5. Still, Sondland kept pressuring the government of Ukraine. Taylor confronted Sondland, saying: “I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign.

Trump’s withholding of funds to Ukraine and his closeness to Putin have been seen in a different light in the wake of Russia’s unprovoked and unjustifiable invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. Indeed, Russia’s actions and their consequent implications for Ukraine, NATO, and the United States have cast a great deal of Trump’s behavior in a very different light from how it was seen during his term of office—an even more damaging and disturbing light, hard as that is to believe. Trump actively wanted to pull the United States out of NATO. He actively attacked the alliance. He advocated for a plan to pull US troops out of Europe. He advanced plans to pull US troops out of Asia, the Pacific, and the Middle East. He effectively sought to hand Syria to the control of Russia and Russia’s allies. He pulled out of arms deals that constrained the Russians. He pulled out of a deal that constrained Iran, a key ally of Russia.

many Trump scandals and conspiracies—tool of the Russians, Charlottesville, Stormy Daniels, “shithole” countries, Sharpiegate, Ukraine, tax returns, Trump Foundation, and on and on—that I don’t think people could keep track of them all.

The methods Donald Trump is using to undermine our democracy are not unique to him. I saw authoritarian leaders use many of these same tactics in Eastern Europe, Russia, Ukraine, and across the Middle East when I was working for the US State Department. History is full of similar examples in countries around the world, but never in the United States—until now. Like

Trump was checked in his ability to do what he was tempted to do in the early weeks of the administration, which was to cut a deal and simply give them Ukraine,” Fried recalled. “They were blocked by Congress.” In July of 2017, Congress passed a version of the measure that McConnell had threatened, the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, broadened to include Iran and North Korea as well as Russia.

those who believe in facts and logic will quickly discover that the United States and its Allies are mainly responsible for this trainwreck. the April 2008 decision to bring Ukraine and Georgia into Nato was destined to lead to conflict with Russia. the Bush administration was the principal architect of that fateful choice, but the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations have doubled down on that policy at every turn...

This act of whistleblowing was not like other acts of whistleblowing. Historically, whistleblowers reveal abuse of power that is surprising and shocking to the public. The Trump-Ukraine story was shocking but in no way surprising: it was in character, and in keeping with a pattern of actions. The incident that the whistleblower chose to report was not the worst thing that Trump had done. Installing his daughter and her husband in the White House was worse. Inciting violence was worse. Unleashing war on immigrants was worse. Enabling murderous dictators the world over was worse.

For two years, in response to the Mueller probe of foreign involvement in the 2016 election, Trump had made his mantra “no collusion.” And here was his personal attorney heading overseas to collude with Ukraine to help Trump in the 2020 election.

All the president cared about was using Ukraine—this battered, vulnerable, embattled nation—to help him get reelected.

It was notable, in light of subsequent defenses of Trump’s behavior on the call, that he made only two demands of Ukraine: to investigate CrowdStrike and the Bidens. Trump said nothing about the need for Zelensky to fight corruption in Ukraine or to defend his country against Russia. All Trump cared about was extorting this vulnerable nation for his personal electoral advantage.

Throughout my West Wing tenure, Trump wanted to do what he wanted to do, based on what he knew and what he saw as his own best personal interests. And in Ukraine, he seemed finally able to have it all.

With regard to Ukraine, Giuliani steered Trump to disaster, in probably the greatest failure of lawyering in the history of presidential scandals. In other words, no Giuliani, no impeachment.

The degree of Russian penetration of the Trump campaign in the summer of 2016 can scarcely be overstated. In June, Trump’s son and campaign high command welcomed Putin’s representatives to hear dirt from them about Trump’s opponent; in August, a suspected Russian spy put forward a plan to consolidate Russian rule in Ukraine—with the implied offer of millions of dollars to Trump’s campaign chairman. And in between those two events, in July, Russian interests had convulsed the Clinton campaign by releasing emails hacked from the accounts of the Democratic Party.

The story of American policy in Ukraine over the next four months, from May to September 2019, demonstrated this tectonic struggle in action. Trump and Giuliani’s goal in this period was straightforward—to use every lever of government policy to force Ukraine to help Trump win reelection.

Military aid to Ukraine represented a rare point of bipartisan consensus in Trump’s Washington—supported by liberals who disdained Putin’s reactionary authoritarianism and by conservatives who wanted to check, as in Soviet days, Russian expansionism. Trump saw the military aid in a different way—as the most compelling form of leverage to use on Zelensky.

On Monday, July 22, Giuliani, Volker, and Yermak had a three-way call for thirty-eight minutes where Giuliani received assurance from Yermak that Zelensky understood what was expected of him in a phone call with Trump. The investigation of the Bidens—not burden sharing with the West, not corruption in Ukraine, not saving lives from Russian bullets and bombs—was all that mattered.

On the other hand, Trump’s abuse of power regarding Ukraine had more grave consequences. He put Ukrainian lives at risk; he rewarded Russian aggression; he jeopardized American national security; he misled our allies; he undermined Congress’s power of the purse; and he lied to everyone about what he was doing and why.

One afternoon in February 2018, the Trump White House released an extremely short, straightforward statement: In June 2017, the Russian military launched the most destructive and costly cyber-attack in history. The attack, dubbed “NotPetya,” quickly spread worldwide, causing billions of dollars in damage across Europe, Asia, and the Americas. It was part of the Kremlin’s ongoing effort to destabilize Ukraine and demonstrates ever more

Separately, on August 2, 2016, Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort met in New York City with his long-time business associate Konstantin Kilimnik, who the FBI assesses to have ties to Russian intelligence. Kilimnik requested the meeting to deliver in person a peace plan for Ukraine that Manafort acknowledged to the Special Counsel’s Office was a “backdoor” way for Russia to control part of eastern Ukraine; both men believed the plan would require candidate Trump’s assent to succeed (were he to be elected President). They also discussed the status of the Trump Campaign and Manafort’s strategy for winning Democratic votes in Midwestern states. Months before that meeting, Manafort had caused internal polling data to be shared with Kilimnik, and the sharing continued for some period of time after their August meeting.

Regardless of whether or not President Trump is impeached, the government is corrupt.

But if you weren’t convinced by Mueller’s report, if you believe President Trump’s actions in 2016 did not warrant impeachment, then this book is for you. Because the proven facts of what President Trump has done with Ukraine far eclipse the allegations of his campaign’s coordination with Russia in 2016. Whereas Mueller’s report could not prove collusion, in this case there is no doubt President Trump tried to collude with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine—because we have notes from the call, released by President Trump himself, demonstrating our president doing exactly that.

abuse of power regarding Ukraine had more grave consequences. He put Ukrainian lives at risk; he rewarded Russian aggression; he jeopardized American national security;

Milos Zeman is the President of the Czech Republic. He is pro-Russian, is friends with Marine Le Pen and Nigel Farage, endorsed Donald Trump for President, and has ties to Hungary’s Jobbik movement. Zeman has justified the civil war in Ukraine and has denied that Russia has a military presence there. He stated, “I take seriously the statement of foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, that there are no Russian troops [in Ukraine].” Zeman had been consistently verbal in his support for the lifting of Western sanctions on Russia and was against EU sanctions on Russia. He was re-elected President in January 2018 with 51.4% of the vote. He won the majority of the rural vote by exhorting a populist anti-immigrant slogan: “Stop Migrants and [opponent] Drahos. This is our land! Vote Zeman!” Zeman’s chief economic advisor is Martin Nejedlÿ, a former executive of the Russian oil company, Lukoil Aviation Czech. Lukoil was once the second largest oil company in Russia following Gazprom. Martin Nejedlÿ of Prague was also owner of Fincentrum, a financial advisory firm with “more than 2,500 financial advisors” on its website with offices in Prague and Bratislava. The firm has a history of alliances with the Kremlin. The Prime Minister of the Republic’s coalition government is 63-year-old Andrej Babiš. He is a media and agribusiness mogul and the second-richest man in the Czech Republic. ANO is the Action of Dissatisfied Citizens Party that was founded by Babiš that holds a center-right populist platform like many European and American conservative right-

One key area of U.S.-Russian tension was Ukraine. According to Steele’s sources, the Trump team agreed to sideline Russia’s intervention in Ukraine during the campaign. Instead, and in order to “deflect attention,” Trump would raise U.S.-NATO defense commitments in the Baltics and Eastern Europe. This would help Putin, “who needed to cauterize the subject.

You will never see me pledge allegiance to a corrupt government.

The truth is raining down on the toxic Trump administration.

The White House accidentally emails House Democrats a list of talking points Wednesday that were intended to aid Trump administration allies in their efforts to respond to the Ukraine scandal — and then the White House asks Democrats to send those talking points back.

the investigation did not establish that one Campaign official's efforts to dilute a portion of the Republican Party platform on providing assistance to Ukraine were undertaken at the behest of candidate Trump or Russia.

Obama expelled thirty-five people described as Russian “intelligence operatives.” He slapped sanctions on two Russian intelligence agencies—the military and civilian spy services, respectively, the GRU and FSB, as well as four “cyber officials” and three companies said to support Russian cyber operations. Further, he shuttered Russian-owned buildings on Long Island and Maryland’s eastern shoreline, which were suddenly branded as intelligence operations. Mind you, these facilities and operatives had been up and running throughout Obama’s presidency. No meaningful action was taken against them throughout the 2016 campaign, while Obama was being extensively briefed about Russia’s hacking and propaganda operations. Nor when Russia annexed Crimea, consolidated its de facto seizure of eastern Ukraine, propped up Assad, armed Iran, buzzed U.S. naval vessels, and saber-rattled in the Baltics. Only now, to prop up a postelection emphasis on the Trump–Russia narrative.

This is genius,” Trump said during an interview on a conservative radio show the next day, February 22, at Mar-a-Lago, praising Putin’s move to declare certain Ukrainian regions independent. “So Putin is now saying, ‘It’s independent,’ a large section of Ukraine. I said, ‘How smart is that?’ And he’s going to go in and be a peacekeeper. That’s the strongest peace force. We could use that on our southern border. That’s the strongest peace force I’ve ever seen. There were more army tanks than I’ve ever seen. They’re going to keep the peace all right. No but think of it. Here’s a guy who’s very savvy, I know him very well. Very, very well,” Trump said gleefully. “I knew that he always wanted Ukraine,” Trump said. “I used to talk to him about it. I said, ‘You can’t do it. You’re not gonna do it.’ But I could see that he wanted it.