So About This Russian Bounty Thing
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The WaPo fact checker (LOLGF):
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/07/30/trumps-four-pinocchio-interview-russian-bounties/
onathan Swan, Axios: “It’s been widely reported that the U.S. has intelligence indicating that Russia paid bounties, or offered to pay bounties, to Taliban fighters to kill American soldiers. You had a phone call with Vladimir Putin on July 23rd. Did you bring up this issue?”
President Trump: “No, that was a phone call to discuss other things, and frankly, that’s an issue that many people said was fake news.”
— Exchange on “Axios on HBO,” July 29, 2020
Trump: “It never reached my desk. You know why? Because they didn’t think it — intelligence — they didn’t think it was real.”
Swan: “It was in your written brief, though.”
Trump: “They didn’t think, they didn’t think it was worthy. I wouldn’t mind. If it reached my desk, I would have done something about it. It never reached my desk because — ”
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Swan: “Do you read your written brief?”
Trump: “I do. I read it a lot. I read a lot. They like to say I don’t read. I read a lot. I comprehend extraordinarily well, probably better than anybody you’ve interviewed in a long time.”
— “Axios on HBO” interview
Trump rarely gets fact-checked on camera, but here we have a good example of an interviewer pressing and prodding on a sensitive topic.
The president has been dismissive of U.S. intelligence reports that Russia offered bounties to the Taliban to kill U.S. troops in Afghanistan. (A “hoax” or “fake news,” Trump says.)
Follow-up questions in a one-on-one setting can expose the strength or weakness of a claim. When asked about reports that he was briefed on the intelligence, and why he didn’t raise the bounties in a call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Trump started dissembling in response. -
Hillary got in on the action too. Would be fun to see the talking points memo that went out and how wide the Soviet style disinformation campaign was.
