Trump reportedly called up a journalist to defend Russia right after a private meeting with Putin in 2017
A new report from The New York Times details how, in 2017, after meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin twice at the G-20 summit in Germany, Trump "telephoned a Times reporter and argued that the Russians were falsely accused of election interference." Although he asked that these comments be off-the-record, the Times' Peter Baker writes that Trump "later repeated a few things in public in little-noticed asides."
Putin had apparently told Trump that if Russia was behind election hacking, "we wouldn't have gotten caught because we're professionals," which Trump thought was a "good point." Trump also reportedly denigrated his intelligence officials as being "political." Trump has often cast doubt on his own intelligence community's conclusion that Russia interfered in the 2016 election, perhaps most infamously at the Helsinki summit with Putin in 2018.
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