From the March 20 edition of CNN's The Lead with Jake Tapper:
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JAKE TAPPER (HOST): Clarissa, let me ask you, as someone who has spent months and months in Russia. I can't help but think, as somebody who likes to meddle in elections and enjoy sowing chaos in the electoral process in liberal democracies throughout the world, Vladimir Putin must really just be enjoying this one way or the other. The American political system is in disarray.
CLARISSA WARD: Well you know what’s really interesting, Jake? I think up to a certain point he was kind of enjoying it. He was enjoying the ambiguity of it, the possibility that he could have thrown the election in the most powerful, important, consequential country in the world. That certainly spoke to his ego.
But what was noticeable today, while every single news channel pretty much in the world -- and I’m talking globally: Sky News. BBC, Al Jazeera. One news channel that very noticeably did not take today's hearing was Russia Today. And I do think you are starting to see now the beginning of what we may call a conscious uncoupling of the Kremlin and the Trump administration, because the Kremlin sees the writing on the wall here and they understand that President Trump will literally be forced at some point to start talking tough with Russia. So we have seen recently the beginnings of a kind of scaling back on the glowing coverage, scaling back on talks of a [unintelligible] with the U.S., of a real a real shift in the zeitgeist in America and less and less coverage of this incident. You know another thing that didn't get much coverage? Michael Flynn's resignation. So clearly the Russians can see what this portends in the long run and they are trying to prepare for it accordingly.
