2016 ELECTION/INTELLIGENCE/RUSSIA/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “US President Donald Trump, in a stunning rebuke of the US intelligence community, declined on Monday [7-16-18] to endorse the US government’s assessment that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election, saying he doesn’t ‘see any reason why’ Russia would be responsible. Instead, Trump — standing alongside Russian President Vladimir Putin — touted Putin’s vigorous denial and pivoted to complaining about the Democratic National Committee’s server and missing emails from Hillary Clinton’s personal account. ‘I have great confidence in my intelligence people, but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today,’ Trump said during a joint news conference after he spent about two hours in a room alone with Putin, save for a pair of interpreters. Trump’s statements amounted to an unprecedented refusal by a US president to believe his own intelligence agencies over the word of a foreign adversary and drew swift condemnation from across the partisan divide. His words signaled that he continues to equate the assessment of Russian election meddling with efforts to deligitimize his election, even though the US intelligence community made no such assessment.”
–Jeremy Diamond, “Trump sides with Putin over US intelligence,” CNN Politics, CNN.com, July 16, 2018 5:28 pm