'Whole thing stinks to high heaven': Charles Blow recalls when Trump bragged about Putin friendship

President Donald Trump's meeting last week with Russian President Vladimir Putin was billed as the first between the two world leaders -- but Charles Blow recalls a different history.

The New York Times columnist pointed out Monday morning that Trump had for years boasted not only that he had met Putin, but that they enjoyed a great relationship -- until he started claiming in July 2016 that he barely knew the Russian president.

"This, coincidentally, was the same news conference at which he encouraged Russia’s cyberattack of Hillary Clinton’s campaign to 'find the 30,000 emails that are missing,'" Blow said.

The two claims cannot possibly both be true, Blow said, so the president is clearly lying about one of the contradictory accounts.

"Our 'president' is a pathological liar," he said. "He lies about everything, all the time. Lying is his resting condition. Therefore, absolutely nothing he or his team says is to be believed, ever."

He questioned Secretary of State Rex Tillerson's account of the Trump-Putin meeting, which Blow said was contradicted by the readout.

"I didn’t get the sense that Trump strongly asserted as fact that Russia attacked our elections or that Trump would seek to punish Russia," Blow said. "The readout tells the opposite story, one of Russia being let off the hook. And this whole business of setting up a cybersecurity working group with the Russians is like inviting the burglar to help you design your alarm system."

Trump continues to question whether Russia attempted to interfere with the U.S. election, even as reports reveal his son and other close campaign associates met secretly with Kremlin allies.

"America is under sustained, possibly even accelerated, attack by a foreign power, the same one that attacked our election, and Trump not only wavers on the source of the attack, but also refuses to condemn the culprit and in fact has a penchant for praising him," Blow said. "This whole thing stinks to high heaven, and we must press on until we uncover the source of the rot."