Should Trump be punishing Moscow - again?

It looks as if Donald Trump is doing his absolute best to downplay the intelligence that the Russian GRU military intelligence service offered bounties to the Taliban last year to kill American and other coalition troops in Afghanistan. The reason? Because if it turns out to be true he will be under huge pressure to punish Moscow and give his friend Vladimir Putin a really hard time. The evidence that the GRU has been at work in Afghanistan handing over piles of dollars to the Taliban is getting stronger by the day. The New York Times says bank intercepts were carried out by the US - presumably by the super clever US Treasury Department unit that tracks illegal and terrorist-linked funding around the world - and lo behold they revealed a lot of cash in the known Taliban bank accounts transferred by a certain Russian military intelligence service. Voila! Also US special forces operating in Afghanistan had picked up all kinds of intelligence about this bounty deal, including from interrogation of captured Taliban fighters who spilled the beans. Trump says all the intelligence was considered non-credible. In other words he is doing Putin a huge favour because he seems to be backing the line pushed out by the Kremlin which is that this bounty stuff is bull***t. But the Democrats are going to press hard on this and, inevitably at some point in the future, some US official will anonymously let the New York Times know that perhaps the intel was after all pretty good but not so damning that the Trump administration felt it necessary to order more sanctions against Russia. Putin presumably is already feeling pretty confident that the man in the White House won't be seeking revenge over the bounty accusation. Knowing as we all do now about the activities of the GRU and the unbelievably blatant way two of their agents calmly went to Salisbury and smeared nerve agent on the Skripals' front door handle, the intelligence gleaned on the bounty deal with the Taliban would seem to me to be utterly credible.