This was the kind of head-spinning, incoherent monologue that I had tried on numerous occasions to document for the presidential record as notetaker. It was a word fog, in which you stumbled around looking for meaning. Somewhere in the haze, however, President Trump had said that he believed Putin over his intelligence officials. The telling lines for me were that “Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial” and “He just said it’s not Russia [so] I don’t see any reason why it would be.”
