WASHINGTON ― Donald Trump renewed a major first-term lie Thursday in his continued defense of Vladimir Putin, falsely claiming that the Russian dictator did not help him win the presidency in 2016.
“We had to go through the Russian hoax together. That was not a good thing. That was not fair. That was a rigged deal and had nothing to do with Russia,” Trump told reporters at a White House photo opportunity with visiting British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
“They had to put up with it,” Trump said of Putin and his aides. “With a phony story that was made up.”
In fact, both special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation and the Senate Intelligence Committee found that Putin made extensive efforts to help Trump win in 2016, most notably by having his spies steal emails from Democrat Hillary Clinton’s aides and then release them during the final month of the campaign through Russian ally WikiLeaks.
What’s more, Trump was informed by the FBI in August of that year that the emails had been stolen by Russia — just weeks after Trump had publicly asked Russia to obtain them. Despite knowing of their provenance, Trump enthusiastically cited the stolen material in campaign rallies and interviews every single day, starting on Oct. 10, 2016, through Election Day.
HuffPost repeatedly asked Trump’s 2016 campaign and first-term White House staff why Trump had knowingly accepted Putin’s help to win and received no answer until 2018, when Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani responded that Trump took the assistance because he could.
“It isn’t illegal… It was sort of like a gift,” he said. “And you’re not involved in the illegality of getting it.”
In 2017, Trump began calling the accurate description of Russia’s work to elect him a “hoax” and eventually sent Giuliani to Ukraine to dig up evidence to support a conspiracy theory being pitched by Russian intelligence that it was actually Ukraine that had tried to help Clinton.
Giuliani’s eagerness to accept information being fed to him by Putin’s spies eventually led to Trump attempting to extort then-newly elected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy into announcing an investigation into the Democrat he feared most in 2020, Joe Biden. Trump was impeached for that action, but the Republican-led Senate declined to remove him from office.
Trump’s animosity toward Zelenskyy appears to have endured in the years since. When Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Trump called it “genius” and “savvy.” He very quickly began complaining that the United States under Biden was sending too much aid to Ukraine, and then began lying about the total the U.S. sent and how it compared to what Western European countries were sending.
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In recent weeks, Trump has on multiple occasions called the democratically elected Zelenskyy a “dictator” but has pointedly refused to say the same of Putin, who has not held free elections in decades and has had his opponents and critics murdered.
During Thursday’s Oval Office session, Trump bizarrely claimed he had never used that word to describe Zelenskyy. “Did I say that? I can’t believe I said that. Next question,” he said.
It was unclear whether Trump forgot about his Feb. 19 social media post and the subsequent speech in which he used that word or whether he was joking. His White House aides did not respond to HuffPost’s queries on the matter.