There’s a simple answer to Trump aides’ confusion about the source of the president’s conspiracy theories — check what he’s been watching on his television. In the months leading up to that September 2017 meeting, sometime presidential adviser Sean Hannity was telling Trump and the rest of his Fox News audience that the “real collusion” during the 2016 election had been between Hillary Clinton and Ukraine.
In July 2017, The New York Times broke the news that Donald Trump Jr. had arranged a June 2016 meeting between the campaign’s top aides and “a Russian lawyer who has connections to the Kremlin” after being informed that the lawyer would provide damaging information on Clinton as part of the Russian “government’s support” for the Trump campaign. The story came weeks after special counsel Robert Mueller was appointed to look into Russian interference in the election and was exacerbated by a false statement Trump Jr. released about the meeting that the president had dictated.