"Doubting the intelligence, Trump pursues Putin and leaves a Russian threat unchecked"
They have laid out the details very meticulously and so there is a lot to go through (I think it will require more than one reading), including some good relationship charts and an excellent timeline for keeping the sequence of events clear in your mind. Most of the information isn't entirely new but this is one of the cleaner compilings of all the information I have seen.
One of the more interesting bits in the piece is that it appears Trump doesn't seem to connect how his actions fuel distrust even among his own party. Essentially his second meeting with Putin at the G-20 secured the 98-2 vote on additional Russian sanctions. He seems completely unable to compromise his way into at least some of the positive things he wants from a US-Russian relationship.
The remark underscored the frustration and disenchantment that have taken hold on both sides amid the failure to achieve the breakthrough in U.S.-Russian relations that Trump and Putin both envisioned a year ago.
As a result, rather than shaping U.S. policy toward Russia, Trump at times appears to function as an outlier in his own administration, unable to pursue the relationship with Putin he envisioned but unwilling to embrace tougher policies favored by some in his Cabinet.
A Pentagon proposal that would pose a direct challenge to Moscow — a plan to deliver lethal arms to Ukrainian forces battling Russia-backed separatists — has languished in internal debates for months.
He is so good at getting the reverse of what he wants sometimes I might almost be convinced that he is reverse-psychologing the country into recognizing Russia as the threat they are.