However, there was some other news breaking that Sunday related to Putin that certainly would have caught Trump’s attention.

At the debate in Nashville days earlier, Trump had accused JOE BIDEN of receiving millions of dollars through some kind of corrupt scheme involving HUNTER BIDEN’s alleged business dealings in Ukraine and Moscow — accusations that were the cornerstone of Trump’s case against Biden in the final days of the 2020 campaign.

But that Sunday, Putin undercut Trump and said that as far as he knew, the allegations were nonsense. Sputnik, a Russian state-controlled media outlet, tweeted the news at 8:40 a.m. But it wasn’t until later in the day, when Trump was wrapping up a rally in New Hampshire, that the news broke through in the American press. Reuters reported at 2:20 p.m., “Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Sunday that he saw nothing criminal in Hunter Biden’s past business ties with Ukraine or Russia, marking out his disagreement with one of Donald Trump’s attack lines in the U.S. presidential election.” (Newsmax ran the same Reuters wire copy at 2:17 p.m.)

Huh. That seems like interesting context on a day when Holder says he was informed that Trump and Putin were on a call together. We asked Holder when his conversation with Meadows happened. “I *think* it was between NH and Maine,” he texted us.