President Trump told a former senior White House official that he knew Ukraine was to blame for the 2016 U.S. election meddling because Russian President Vladimir Putin told him so, The Washington Post reports. The president reportedly embraced theories about Ukrainian interference early in his presidency, but he became more insistent after he met privately with Putin at the July 2017 G-20 summit. After meeting with Putin in Hamburg, Trump repeatedly said he believed that Putin didn’t interfere in the 2016 election—despite the conclusions of U.S. intelligence—and that Ukraine had sought to have Hillary Clinton in office. “Putin told me,” he reportedly told one official. Another former official said there was a “strong belief in the White House was that Putin told him” the information.
