The Dutch Foreign Minister Resigned Over Lying About A Meeting With Putin

Zijlstra told his colleagues Tuesday that he resigned because he had lied about a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, an act he called “by far the biggest mistake I have committed in my entire career.”

“This is about the credibility of the minister of foreign affairs of the Kingdom of the Netherlands,” Zijlstra said. “That credibility must be beyond doubt.”

Sessions told a Senate committee he'd never met with Russians during the Trump presidential campaign, when he'd really met with former Russian ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak. That led him to eventually recuse himself from the Justice Department's investigation into the campaign's ties with Russia.

For years, Zijlstra has been saying he attended a meeting where Putin said he thought of former Soviet Union members Belarus, Ukraine, and the Baltic states as part of “Greater Russia.” Then he changed his story to say that, no, he wasn't there himself, but he was relaying comments from a source who actually was at the meeting. But then his supposed source, a former Shell executive, basically said nope, that doesn't sound like something he told him ever.

More ironic: He was just HOURS away from leaving for a trip to MOSCOW.

"In the Netherlands Russia is being blamed for disseminating disinformation," the statement read. "Dutch officials are constantly making such unfounded statements. Sadly, Dutch media outlets are willingly spreading the idea conceived in someone’s inflamed imagination that Russian authorities are obsessed with creating a 'Great Russia' Moreover, it is presented as something self-evident and not requiting any proof. Isn’t this an example of fake news directed against our country?"