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. 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. 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.”