there has been other signs of this, too. rick gates told fbi agents in an interview for the russia investigation that the main person in the trump campaign who started spreading this falsehood that it was ukraine that interfered in the 2016 election and not russia was paul manafort, the president's campaign chair who's now serving a long federal prison term in part for him laundering and not paying taxes on millions of dollars he got from pro-putin interests in ukraine. more specifically than that, though, where did manafort get that theory from? he got it from his longtime associate in ukraine who was assessed by the fbi to have active ties to russian intelligence services. so russian intelligence services cooked this up. they have every incentive in the world to spread this idea that it was ukraine, bad, bad ukraine that interfered in the 2016 election against trump. not russia interfering in the 2016 election to help trump, right? they had every incentive in the world to do that.