If you make a list of the most important entities that influenced the outcome of the 2016 presidential election and looked just at the influence of foreign leaders, Putin's name would come way far behind Netanyahu's. Yet Netanyahu is rarely mentioned and Putin gets enormous blame (credit?).
So looking at why that is let me speculate: 1) The Democrats needed a scapegoat and Apartheid Israel, which the bipartisan US ruling class uses as its unsinkable aircraft carrier to keep the rest of the Middle East destabilized and/or subservient, is off the table. 2) Russia has been a target of US imperialism since Putin became president and promoted Russian nationalism over subservience to US imperialism. 3) Russia has put up real barriers to US hegemony in the Middle East. 4) Russian energy is competing with US-based big fossil fuel, most notably in Western Europe, whereas BigOil is a powerful force on US domestic and foreign policy. 5) Russian is allying itself with China, despite their huge ideological differences, in resisting US imperialism. China's economy is currently rolling over the US. 6) Russia under Putin is resisting NATO's expansion up to its borders, the purpose being to intimidate Russia into capitulation another time. 7) Despite the capitalist nature of Russia it is consciously conflated with socialist USSR and thus suffers from bipartisan anti-Sovietism, anti-Communism, but ironically despite the Democrat's Putin scapegoating reeks strongly of Trump's Republican base.
The corporate media and some of the "independent" so-called progressive media are allied with this effort to scapegoat Putin. My guess is that the CIA doesn't even have to pay the latter.
