‘Morning Joe’ Rails Against Republicans ‘Repeating Putin Talking Points’

The MSNBC morning show finished what NBC’s “Meet the Press” started Sunday

MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” started the week by picking up where NBC’s “Meet the Press” left off on Sunday: Hammering GOP Sen. John Kennedy — and by extension, some of his Republican colleagues — for “repeating Putin talking points,” specifically by reiterating claims of Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election.

On Sunday, Kennedy accused former Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko of “actively” working for Hillary Clinton during her 2016 campaign against President Trump.

Moderator Chuck Todd pushed back then, saying, “You realize the only other person selling this argument outside of the United States is this man, Vladimir Putin. This is what he said on November 20: ‘Thank God nobody is accusing us anymore of interfering in U.S. elections. Now they’re accusing Ukraine. Well, let them sort this out among themselves.’ You just accused a former president of Ukraine. You’ve done exactly what the Russian operation is trying to get American politicians to do. Are you at all concerned that you’ve been duped?”

Throughout Monday’s “Morning Joe,” the cable panelists made the same points, criticizing Republicans who fall in line to defend Trump. (That has been a months-long theme of the show, which is hosted by former GOP Rep. Joe Scarborough.)

“What about these Republicans, these so-called ‘conservatives?’” asked Scarborough, referencing his time in office. “People who stood by me as we fought against Russian influence and the spread of communism and fought for conservative values?”

He slammed them for “going on national television, repeating Putin talking points. The United States Senate even gotta a warning from the intel agencies — Donald Trump’s intel agencies — that this is propaganda that Vladimir Putin has been trying to push for the past several years.”

Watch the video above.

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