In this case it would be AP's Matt Lee, their diplomatic affairs correspondent, who's been around the block many times and whose reputation is that he takes no crap from flacks regardless of party. Imagine that!

So in today's State Department brief, spokesman Ned Price was given the unenviable task of dressing up the Administration's latest offering of bovine excrement and selling it as a gourmet dip. At issue was a "leaked" story in the Washington Post – ahem -that Russia is planning an elaborate video fabrication of a Ukrainian attack on eastern Ukraine to serve as a false flag to justify a Russian incursion into Ukraine.

This after a month or so of the US Administration insisting that a Russian invasion of Ukraine was "imminent." It was a claim dramatically refuted by none other than the one political leader who on paper would benefit most from such a narrative –  the Ukrainian president himself – who told Biden on a phone call to go take his meds and stop fearmongering about a Russian invasion of Ukraine!