Right, "Intel" gave him a call 10:30 Sunday night after leaving him hanging for
48 hours. "Hi, Mr. President, Intel here, we got a line on that report that
we've been collecting evidence going back to
January that GRU has been paying Afghan
militants to kill NATO troops since 2018, and it turns out when we had that emergency National Security Council meeting on the subject last March, as reported in The
Times, WaPo, and Wall Street Journal, among other places, we apparently decided
the evidence wasn't credible, so we didn't want to bother you. We suspect the
New York Times Book Review of fabricating the whole thing."
With their field critics in Helmand, who planted the story with the militants
("Just tell the interrogators Russians were paying you, and in turn we'll get
you lunch with an agent to pitch your manuscript"). No, the
@nytimesbooks bit must be a bizarre Autocorrect. But in general he's once
again gotten out ahead of where the cleanup crew can follow him,
simultaneously acknowledging that the reports exist, "based at least in part
on interrogations of captured Afghan militants and criminals", and claiming
that The Times made them up.
And in other cheap shots:
