For years, former President Donald Trump has avoided agreeing with intelligence assessments that Russian President Vladimir Putin interfered on his behalf during the 2016 presidential election.
Most infamously, Trump rejected the American intelligence community's assessment about Russia's actions at a press conference in Helsinki, Finland where he stood next to Putin and said, "President Putin says it's not Russia, I don't see any reason why it would be."
But it seems that Trump will actually blame Putin for 2016 election interference if doing so will help keep him out of prison.
Politico's Kyle Cheney flags a legal filing by Trump's attorneys this week in which they dispute special counsel Jack Smith's claims that Trump has damaged Americans' faith in the electoral system by essentially arguing that Putin did it first.
"The Special Counsel's Office falsely alleges that President Trump 'eroded public faith in the administration of the election,'" the filing states. "The 2016 [Intelligence Community Assessment] uses strikingly similar language to attribute the origins of that erosion to foreign influence -- that is, foreign efforts to 'undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process.'"
The filing went on to argue that "President Trump is entitled to the detailed information supporting the conclusions in the 2016 Election ICA... in order to demonstrate to a jury that he did not create or cause the environment that the prosecution seeks to blame him for."
What Trump's lawyers leave out is the fact that Trump openly encouraged Russia to hack political rival Hillary Clinton's email server and release her private communications.
When Russia eventually leaked hacked emails from Clinton's campaign to WikiLeaks, Trump eagerly promoted them while on the campaign trail as evidence of Clinton's purported corruption.
