Security expert claims breakthrough on 'key meeting' where Trump became beholden to 'Kremlin agents'

On Thursday, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow revealed that President Donald Trump appears to get his craziest conspiracy theories directly from the Kremlin, parroting Vladimir Putin's talking points on subjects like the relationship between the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan and its collapse.

A former FBI counterintelligence agent has said that the FBI is likely to look into how Trump got his mistaken version of Russian history.

On Saturday afternoon, professor and Proof of Collusion author Seth Abramson posted a Twitter thread in which he analyzed how Trump gets intelligence and propaganda from Kremlin sources through the lens of a meeting Trump held at the Trump International Hotel in Washington D.C. on March 31, 2016,

At that meeting, Trump "personally ordered" the Republican National Committee to update its platform on Ukraine to match Russia's stance at that meeting.

"There was one mystery I was never able to resolve, and therefore isn't resolved in" his book, Abramson tweeted. "The mystery: who the hell put a bug in Trump's ear about Ukraine? The question was an important one because here was Trump... [then] having virtually no knowledge of foreign affairs, issuing an edict on Ukraine to his team for a convention he might never even make it to."

Abramson sees a clue to what happened in the photo of the meeting—namely, the absence of Trump's first National Security Advisory aide, Carter Page.

"Page—a once-suspected Russian spy—was so unqualified we can reasonably say his selection for Trump's committee was the best thing that had ever happened to him," Abramson writes. "Yet when you look at the pic atop this thread, you don't see Carter Page. That's right—Page *skipped out* on the first-ever meeting of a committee the elevation to which was the *literal highlight* of his entire professional career... Page not being able to make the meeting suggests the timing of the set-up of the meeting was very short indeed—which would match the very short timing for the scheduling of Trump's first foreign policy speech, which was *officially* an event Manafort was responsible for."

So, Abramson, concludes, Trump held this meeting and changed his stance on Russia within four days of hiring Putin-tied operative Paul Manafort as an adviser.

Read the first part of Abramson's thread below.