Vladimir Putin throws Donald Trump under the bus in Russia scandal

| 6:22 pm EDT August 30, 2017
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Over the past three days the media has been demonstrating just how aggressively Donald Trump and his team were working to build a Trump Tower in Moscow while Trump was running for President of the United States. Now, when Trump is at a particularly vulnerable point in his Russia scandal, and could use the help of the Kremlin more than ever, Vladimir Putin has instead decided to rather cravenly throw him under the bus by making the scandal bigger.

As the New York Times and Washington Post have raced each other to flesh out the Trump Tower Moscow story this week, one of the key details has been that Donald Trump’s longtime personal attorney Michael Cohen had reached out to Putin through his spokesman for help. The Kremlin could have helped out Trump and Cohen quite a bit by claiming that it never received the email. But instead, according to an on-air report today by NBC News, the Kremlin has released a statement today confirming that it did in fact receive the email.

Michael Cohen admits that he discussed the Trump Tower Moscow project with Donald Trump on several occasions, but he’s claiming that Trump didn’t know he sent the email request for help to Putin’s spokesman. However, Cohen has worked for Trump for decades, and he never would have done something that major unless Trump signed off on it first. So now we know that Trump reached out to Putin for help with a real estate project in Moscow during the election, and that Putin received that message. It proves that Trump and Putin were communication about matters of personal finance during the election, which in turn demonstrates that Trump was using his campaign to try to curry personal favor with Putin. But there’s more.

Vladimir Putin is cutthroat and calculating. He made a clear decision to throw Donald Trump under the bus today, when he could have helped him instead. Either Putin is trying to punish Trump for failing to come through on sanctions relief, or he’s given up on his failed Trump experiement and he’s now trying to finish him off entirely.