The most important point was what Putin stressed several times but was largely lost in translation, namely:
That regardless of who hacked into DNC and HRC servers, the “damaging” information that was leaked were facts, not propaganda. The damaging facts related to the DNC rigging the primaries against Sanders to assure Clinton would be nominated. Nobody is disputing it was rigged - the entire DNC leadership resigned over the scandal.
Putin’s point was that here you have undisputed evidence of illegal election tampering by the DNC that actually affected the results of an election, and to distract from that known corruption, the intelligence community under Obama conspired to focus on who hacked the servers and who leaked the information. The entire Russia hacking Trump collusion narrative is nothing but a distraction from the real crime which is being completely ignored!
Another point he made with Wallace was that at the time all of this happened Trump was not expected by anyone to have a shot at the nomination - the Russians had no reason to study him or spend resources learning about how his being elected might impact Russia strategically. Trump was not a concern at the time.
Putin tried to make these important points several times with Trump and several times with Chris Wallace but Wallace kept interrupting and the translations were often unclear.
I thought Putin came off as extremely transparent and credible. It would be great to have a Russian language scholar go over the transcripts and clean up any ambiguities.
I know that when an interpreter is translating on the fly, there is often a problem with complex sentences where a qualifying phrase is used but it is unclear which part of the sentence is being qualified.
For example, if I say “Please feed my friend the chicken.” Am I saying please feed my friend who is a chicken, or am I saying please feed my friend the meat of a chicken? A comma would help but there is no punctuation in the spoken word.
Anyway, I thought Putin had a lot of very compelling points and I hope more careful attention is given to what he said.
Great post. Smart, insightful and very helpful in furthering our understanding of what has been happening. Thanks for it. :)