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Donald Trump Defends Vladimir Putin In Fox News Interview [Video]

By Nick Younker
Published on: 13:27 PST, Feb 4, 2017

Donald Trump has long been accused by the Democrats of deceiving the American public by plotting with Vladimir Putin and the Russian government to win the election and take over the presidency of United States. Although most of that has been speculation, there have been some key moments in public interviews and on social media that have supported the theory.

One of those key elements that support that conspiracy theory was when Donald Trump did an interview with Fox News host Bill O’Reilly. What is important for people to understand here is that even though Fox News and Bill O’Reilly have historically leaned to the right with news and politics, there has been a long feud between themselves and Donald Trump, and hosts from Fox News have been known to really force Donald Trump to support his rhetoric.

So in the interview with Bill O’Reilly on Fox News, as reported by Deadline, Donald Trump was asked about whether or not he respected Vladimir Putin. Even though most have already heard Donald Trump say that he has a lot of respect for Putin on the campaign trail, there has been no official word on that until now whether or not Donald Trump as the American president respects Putin.

“I do respect him (Putin), but I respect a lot of people. That doesn’t mean I’m going to get along with him,” Donald Trump told Bill O’Reilly during their pre-taped Super Bowl interview.

The clip that Fox News released for that interview, which won’t air until Sunday, clearly shows that Donald Trump gave some answers that even made Bill O’Reilly cringe. That includes when O’Reilly said that Putin was a killer and Donald Trump seemed to defend Putin when he said it, comparing Putin to a lot of people, including the United States, for being the same thing.

The Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin conspiracy theories have been running rampant ever since U.S. intelligence agencies all concluded that Russia was guilty of hacking the Democratic Party before the general election, which in turn ended up with WikiLeaks publishing private emails from within the Hillary Clinton campaign that were very damaging.

At the same time that Donald Trump was riding the wave of the WikiLeaks stories, James Comey with the FBI also dealt Hillary Clinton another blow announcing that he was reopening the investigation into her email scandal just days before the general election. Comey later announced that the FBI was not going to seek any charges against Clinton, but the damage had already been done.

So now that the American people are two weeks into Donald Trump’s presidency, he has yet to publicly condemn Vladimir Putin or the Russian government for their role in hacking the DNC. That could also be because of another news report that came out just before the Donald Trump inauguration, which said that Russia has compromising documents and/or photos of Donald Trump while he was in Russia. Such documents, if leaked by the Russians, could be detrimental to Donald Trump should he take certain actions against Russia.

There has been some speculation from both the right and the left that Donald Trump would eventually ease off the sanctions imposed on Russia and Vladimir Putin, which were imposed by the administration of previous U.S. President Barack Obama.

It is unclear at this time if the comments made by Donald Trump to Fox News host Bill O’Reilly are his way of sidestepping the question, or if he really intends to take the sanctions off Russia and form a closer relationship with Vladimir Putin. But by doing so, he would be on the receiving end of ire from members of his own party, which includes John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Mitch McConnell.

[Featured Image by Win McNamee/Getty Images]

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