Tillerson secretly warned the Russians, and Kushner and Bannon were consulted before the White House rattled its saber. All this occurred this week as President Donald Trump displayed what two White House officials characterized as relative indifference and passivity towards the subject, instead opting to focus his public and private energies towards fuming at his domestic enemies  in the Democratic Party and the “fake news.”“The president cares more about CNN and the Russia story than [Syria] at the moment,” one official observed.