Trump’s seeming willingness to listen to input from foreign agents over U.S. intelligence will be confirmed in February 2019, when it is revealed that in mid-2017 Trump told his intelligence briefers that on the question of whether North Korea’s chairman, Kim Jong-Un, had just tested a new intercontinental ballistic missile that could reach the United States, “I believe Putin.” The president of the Russian Federation was at the time was telling Trump, contrary to what the U.S. president was hearing from his own intelligence community, that no such launch had occurred.115
