Trump parrots shadowy Russian-backed claims to attack his own Supreme Court pick

President Donald Trump greets Supreme Court justices after addressing a joint session of Congress, March 4, 2025. Image via Screengrab / PBS.

President Donald Trump has previously fumed at the Supreme Court, which includes three judges he appointed, for differing from him on issues like his tariffs, his attempted suppression of mail-in ballots and his opposition to birthright citizenship. Now he has cited a right-wing commentator notorious for having been secretly funded by the Russian government to attack one of his own appointed justices, Judge Amy Coney Barrett.

“Amy Coney Barrett is clearly terrified of the left,” Tim Pool posted in a comment that Trump shared. In 2024 Pool was discovered by President Joe Biden’s Justice Department to have accepted money from two RT employees, Konstantin Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva, as part of their nearly $10 million plan to fund an unnamed Tennessee-based company that would influence American politics through pro-Trump commentators.

“Should these allegations prove true, I as well as the other personalities and commentators were deceived and are victims,” Pool wrote at the time. “I cannot speak for anyone else at the company as to what they do or to what they are instructed.”

In addition to Pool the scheme included Matt Christiansen, Dave Rubin, Benny Johnson, Lauren Southern and Taylor Hansen.

Speaking with this author for Salon in 2018, a former US ambassador to Russia who Trump offered to hand over to Russian President Vladimir Putin, Michael McFaul, questioned whether Trump has been compromised.

“The generous interpretation,” McFaul said at the time, is that Trump “didn’t understand what he was talking about. But let’s be clear: What Trump was doing was assigning moral equivalency to a legitimate indictment with lots of evidence against several Russian military intelligence officers for violating American sovereignty in 2016 during the presidential elections, with a completely fabricated, cockamamie story invented by Putin. To even, for a moment, give any kind of dignity to what President Putin proposed was not in America’s national interest, from my point of view.”

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