Tag: with Trump it’s always Russia

Trump Still Defers to Putin, Even as He Dismisses U.S. Intelligence and the Allies

New York Times logoSay this about President Trump’s approach to Moscow: It’s been consistent.

WASHINGTON — On the eve of accepting the Republican nomination for president four years ago, Donald J. Trump declared that he would pull out of NATO if American allies did not pay more for their defense, waving away the thought that it would play into the hands of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who has spent his career trying to dismantle the Western alliance.

Asked about his deference to the Kremlin leader, Mr. Trump responded, “He’s been complimentary of me.”

This week, as his renomination nears, Mr. Trump announced that he was pulling a third of American troops from Germany. He declared in recent days that he had never raised with Mr. Putin, during a recent phone conversation, American intelligence indicating that Russia was paying a bounty to the Taliban for the killing of American soldiers in Afghanistan, because he distrusted the information from his own intelligence agencies. Nor has he issued warnings about what price, if any, Mr. Putin would pay for seeking to influence the 2020 election or pushing disinformation about the coronavirus. American intelligence agencies say Russia is trying both. Continue reading.

Trump’s Four-Pinocchio interview on Russian bounties

Washington Post logoTrump rarely gets fact-checked on camera, but here we have a good example of an interviewer pressing and prodding on a sensitive topic.

The president has been dismissive of U.S. intelligence reports that Russia offered bounties to the Taliban to kill U.S. troops in Afghanistan. (A “hoax” or “fake news,” Trump says.)

Follow-up questions in a one-on-one setting can expose the strength or weakness of a claim. When asked about reports that he was briefed on the intelligence, and why he didn’t raise the bounties in a call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Trump started dissembling in response. Continue reading.

Exclusive: Trump never raised Russia’s Taliban bounties with Putin

Axios logoPresident Trump has never confronted Vladimir Putin with intelligence indicating Russia paid the Taliban to kill U.S. troops, he told “Axios on HBO” in an interview on Tuesday.

Why it matters: Democrats have seized on the issue, and Trump’s reluctance to discuss it, as evidence he’s unwilling to challenge Putin even when American lives are at stake.

  • Trump spoke with Putin on Thursday, and subsequently deflected a question about whether he’d raised the alleged bounty scheme, saying on Monday: “We don’t talk about what we discussed, but we had plenty of discussion.”

In Tuesday’s interview, he was definitive:

“I have never discussed it with him.”

Continue reading.

Trump Won’t Say Whether He Discussed Soldier Bounties With Putin

President Donald Trump refuses to tell the American people whether or not he has talked with President Vladimir Putin about Russia’s bounty program to pay the Taliban to kill U.S. soldiers.

Trump was finally asked about it, and if he discussed it last week during his call with the President of the Russian Federation.

“We don’t talk about what we discussed, but we had plenty of discussion,” Trump told reporters when finally asked. He added, “I think it was very productive.” Continue reading.

Bill Barr endangers national security to promote a lie

AlterNet logoNot long after William Barr assigned John Durham to investigate the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation, the president gave the attorney general the power to declassify information pertaining to the investigation. As I wrote at the time, what that really meant was that Barr would be able to selectively release classified information that bolstered his charge that the previous administration had spied on the Trump campaign. According to the New York Times, that is exactly what is happening.

Not long after the early 2017 publication of a notorious dossier about President Trump jolted Washington, an expert in Russian politics told the F.B.I. he had been one of its key sources, drawing on his contacts to deliver information that would make up some of the most salacious and unproven assertions in the document.

The F.B.I. had approached the expert, a man named Igor Danchenko, as it vetted the dossier’s claims. He agreed to tell investigators what he knew with an important condition, people familiar with the matter said — that the F.B.I. keep his identity secret so he could protect himself, his sources and his family and friends in Russia.

But his hope of remaining anonymous evaporated last week after Attorney General William P. Barr directed the F.B.I. to declassify a redacted report about its three-day interview of Mr. Danchenko in 2017 and hand it over to Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Mr. Graham promptly made the interview summary public while calling the entire Russia investigation “corrupt.”

The NYT report goes on to say that, while Danchenko’s name was redacted in the released document, it was just a matter of days before “online sleuths” (Russian agents?) were able to identify him based on clues left visible in the declassified document. Continue reading.

Germany rejects Trump’s proposal to let Russia back into G7: foreign minister

BERLIN (Reuters) – Germany has rejected a proposal by U.S. President Donald Trump to invite Russian President Vladimir Putin back into the Group of Seven (G7) most advanced economies, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said in a newspaper interview published on Monday.

Trump raised the prospect last month of expanding the G7 to again include Russia, which had been expelled in 2014 following Moscow’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea region.

But Maas told Rheinische Post that he did not see any chance for allowing Russia back into the G7 as long as there was no meaningful progress in solving the conflict in Crimea as well as in eastern Ukraine. Continue reading.