Trump Wants Russia to Interfere for Him Again
BY BRIAN BEUTLER
July 7, 2017
The last time President Donald Trump met in person with senior Russian officials, he ran down FBI Director James Comey as a “nut job” whom he’d fired to relieve the “great pressure” of the sprawling investigation into the Kremlin’s efforts to subvert the U.S. election. He also disclosed code-word classified intelligence, which may have jeopardized an Israeli infiltrator of the Islamic State
What Trump reportedly did not do was chastise Russia for attacking American sovereignty. Nor, according to Comey, did he ever show interest in U.S. government efforts to disrupt Russian cyberattacks.
In the days and hours leading up to Friday’s meeting, we learned that Trump tasked White House aides with identifying “deliverables”—including diplomatic facilities the Obama administration confiscated from the Russian government after the elections—that Trump can offer Putin in negotiations over god knows what.
It is frequently suggested that Trump’s solicitousness of Russian interests reflects his long-held affinity for strongmen, and that his imperviousness to the consensus that Russia meddled in the election reflects insecurity about the legitimacy of his victory in an election where he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by millions. But this analysis, attractive and safe in some ways, is too generous. Matt Yglesias’s slightly harsher assessment in Vox, that Trump is behaving like an accessory after the fact, is closer to the mark but incomplete. Based on everything we know, it is less of a reach to assume not just that Trump is helping Russia cover up past crimes, but that he appreciated Russia’s meddling on his behalf, and is sending strong signals that he would welcome more of it in the future.
https://newrepublic.com/article/143753/trump-wants-russia-interfere
= new reply since forum marked as read
