Loading ...JEFF CHILDERS SUNDAY EDITION : PART 1
Get ready for some mind-blowing dot-connecting. Early this morning, the Washington Post ran this whiny headline: “Russians cheer Putin’s Alaska invitation, envision no concessions on Ukraine.” An ominous sub-headline added, “Analysts noted Alaska was once part of the Russian Empire, and some nationalists believe it should be returned.” Whatever. The story was about the leaders’ scheduled meeting this week. But consider this: the last time Trump and Putin met was seven years ago at the dramatic meeting in July, 2018 in Helsinki, when Trump first began publicly pushing back against US intelligence and RussiaGate.
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In that sense, the men’s upcoming meeting, the first since Helsinki when the adventures began, completes a seven-year arc. Look again at the picture above. Trump — uncharacteristically — has the face of a man who’s just been handed some very bad news and now has to think hard about what it means. Putin wears the look of someone who’s just delivered that bad news and is contemplating the wreckage and all the messy spadework to follow.
I’ve advanced this theory before, but now we have some receipts. Let me set the table. As mentioned, in July, 2018, Trump and Putin met in Helsinki , in the midst of the gathering RussiaGate storm, to discuss arms control and counterterrorism. The media was howling that Trump should push Putin about Russia’s alleged interference in the 2016 election.
It was widely reported that they met privately for over two hours — no aides, just interpreters. Afterward, Putin and Trump held a larger meeting with staff. To this day, nobody knows what was said in that first session.
But I think I do.
Thanks to Tulsi Gabbard’s declassifications last week, we now know that, in late July 2016 —mere months before the election— U.S. intelligence received what it described as a “Russian intelligence analysis” alleging that Hillary Clinton had personally approved a plan to link Donald Trump to Russian hacking in order to distract from her own email scandal. CIA Director John Brennan briefed President Obama, Vice President Biden, FBI Director James Comey, and other senior officials, and forwarded a formal referral memo to the FBI for investigation.
The Russian intel flatlined right there, on the operating table. There’s no evidence the Obama administration pursued it — and why would they? It would have torpedoed the final months of Hillary’s campaign.
The newly declassified Durham annex confirms that analysts did not assess the Russian report as fabricated. But later —under pressure from Obama’s political appointees— the IC landed on the now-familiar narrative that Putin preferred Trump. That claim was founded only from part of a single sentence. A fragment. A handful of words so ambiguous that five analysts gave five different interpretations.
That sentence fragment stood against a thick stack of evidence that Putin was agnostic about the race and, in fact, expected Hillary to win — the prevailing view in Moscow, informed by U.S. polling.
So here’s what we now know: in 2016, the Russians had already sussed out Clinton’s plan to smear Trump with RussiaGate. They had put it in writing, presumably along with evidence, sources, and intercepts of their own — and even passed it to U.S. intelligence. We can also safely assume that U.S. intelligence never gave the report to President Trump after he took office. If it had, he would have gone full-throttle on “Crooked Hillary” as a defense.
Here’s my theory: in that private 2018 meeting —with Trump besieged by a metastasizing scandal and impeachment drums at home, and Russia hearing the same war drums pounding against itself— Putin would have explained the whole scam to Trump. Why wouldn’t he? We tried to tell you in 2016. He could have slid across the table the Russians’ 2016 assessment and explained it had been sitting in U.S. intelligence files the whole time. If Trump had truly never seen it, that would have been the moment he grasped the entire deep state plot in one, unfiltered hit.
At the conclusion of the Helsinki summit, Putin dramatically produced a World Cup soccer ball and handed it to President Trump with an enigmatic half-smile. “Mr. President, the ball is in your court.” The press accused the Russians of bugging the ball. But if my theory is right, the moment was layered with symbolism. The soccer ball wasn’t just a souvenir; it was a metaphor, a public wink. In that private room, Putin gave Trump the Russians’ 2016 assessment— the buried intel that disclosed the whole plot. Now, in front of the cameras, he gave Trump a sports symbol: you have what you need to fight back — it’s your play.
Take the following seven years and re-imagine them through this lens: that in July 2018, Trump finally understood — thanks to Russia — exactly what he was up against. Every subpoena, every leak, every breathless “former official” whisper in the press looks different if, from that day forward, Trump knew the 2016 smear wasn’t just political hardball, but a coordinated intelligence op, nurtured inside his own government, and buried so deeply that it had to be handed to him by a foreign head of state.
If I’m right — and I think I am — then Trump, and by extension the rest of us, owe Russia a debt of gratitude that no one in polite Washington will ever acknowledge. Their intelligence services, whatever their motives, were more loyal to the truth —and to the actual U.S. government as constituted under the Constitution— than were our own agencies. The Russians tried to warn us in 2016. Our own people buried it. That is a sentence I never expected to write, but here we are.
Let’s keep all that in mind as the Alaska Summit plays out.