Michael Crowley
October 20, 2016
Trump sides with Putin over U.S. intelligence
Donald Trump angrily insisted on Wednesday night that he is not Vladimir Putin’s “puppet.”
But at a minimum, in recent months he has often sounded like the Russian president’s lawyer—defending Putin against a variety of specific charges, from political killings to the 2014 downing of a passenger jet over Ukraine, despite the weight of intelligence, legal findings and expert opinion.
Wednesday, for instance, Trump dismissed Hillary Clinton’s assertion that Russia was behind the recent hacking of Democratic Party and Clinton campaign emails.
“She has no idea whether it’s Russia or China or anybody else,” Trump retorted. “Our country has no idea.”
As Clinton tried to explain that the Russian role is the finding of 17 military and civilian intelligence agencies, Trump cut her off: “I doubt it.”
On Oct. 7, the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a joint statement saying that the U.S. intelligence community “is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations.” That finding has also been relayed directly to Trump in the classified national security briefings he receives as a major party nominee.
But Trump and his aides have repeatedly cast doubt on that conclusion. During his first debate with Clinton last month, Trump said the culprit might be “somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds.“ Speaking on MSNBC Wednesday, his campaign spokesman, Jason Miller, said that “when law enforcement is done with their investigation, they’ll put out a final report and then we’ll know.” It was unclear whether Miller is unaware of the intelligence community’s Oct. 7 statement or whether he meant to suggest that Trump would need more detailed evidence before reaching a conclusion.
National security insiders said Trump’s dismissal of an intelligence consensus sets a troubling precedent.
“The U.S. intelligence community is normally reticent about making intelligence assessments public,” said Rajesh De, a former general counsel at the National Security Agency and Obama White House aide. “It is stunning that Donald Trump is willing to bring his know-nothing approach to matters of national security and to question the professional judgment of those who defend our security with no apparent basis in reality.”
Speaking on CNN after the debate, Trump supporter and former Reagan White House aide Jeffrey Lord noted that U.S. intelligence agencies were wrong in their prewar assessment that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, which CIA Director George Tenet once described as a “slam dunk.” But Trump himself has not questioned the broader reliability of U.S. intelligence findings, leaving the basis for his doubt unclear.
Trump’s stance on the email issue is consistent, however, with his response in several other cases where Putin or Russia have been accused of malevolent behavior.
In January, a British government inquiry into the murder of an ex-KGB agent who had been publicly critical of Putin concluded that the Russian leader had “probably” approved the 2006 killing of Alexander Litvinenko, who drank green tea in a London hotel that had been laced with radioactive polonium-210.
British Prime Minister Theresa May, then a cabinet minister, said the report, by a senior British judge, had shown "a blatant and unacceptable breach of the most fundamental tenets of international law and of civilized behavior”, while a Labour Party statement called it an “unparalleled act of state-sponsored terrorism.”
A year earlier, the London Telegraph reported that communications intercepted by the NSA had linked Litvinenko’s killers to the Russian government.
But when asked about the report on the Fox Business Network, Trump was dismissive.
“They say a lot of things about me that are untrue, too,” Trump said. “In all fairness to Putin … he hasn’t been convicted of anything. Some people say he absolutely didn’t do it. First of all, he says he didn’t do it. But many people say it wasn’t him. So who knows who did it?“
“I’m not saying this because he says Trump is brilliant and leading everybody,” the Republican candidate added.
A month earlier, Trump also defended Putin against the charge that the Russian leader approved the murder of critical journalists since he took power in 2000.
During a Dec. 18 episode of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” the show’s host, Joe Scarborough pressed Trump on his friendly comments about Putin, saying that the Russian president “kills [people] that don’t agree with him.”
"Well, I think that our country does plenty of killing, too, Joe,” Trump replied.
Two days later, ABC News host George Stephanopoulos pressed Trump on the point: “You and other people tell me he killed reporters. I don’t know that he killed reporters. I haven’t seen it. If he did, I think it’s despicable. I think it would be horrible. But you’re making these accusations and I don’t — I don’t see any proof.”
PolitFact recently identified at least 34 journalists murdered in Russia under apparently work-related circumstances since 2000. Evidence directly implicating Putin in those deaths is scant and mostly circumstantial, but many experts say Putin tacitly condones a climate of violence toward reporters who question his power. PolitiFact notes that just one of those 34 homicides was fully adjudicated.
And on Oct. 15 of last year, Trump cast doubt on the consensus view of the U.S. and several European governments that pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine shot down Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 with a surface-to-air missile in July 2014, killing all 298 aboard.
“That’s a horrible thing that happened,” Trump told CNN. “It’s disgusting and disgraceful, but Putin and Russia say they didn’t do it, the other side said they did, no one really knows who did it, probably Putin knows who did it. Possibly it was Russia but they are totally denying it.”
Two days earlier, a Dutch government investigative team released a report finding that the plane had been downed with a missile carried on the Russian-made Buk surface-to-air system. And U.S. officials had already been saying for months that they knew “with confidence” that the plane was downed, as Secretary of State John Kerry put it, with “a system that was transferred from Russia into the hands of separatists.”
The Russian government has disputed the claim, suggesting, among other theories, that the passenger jet might have been shot down by a Ukrainian government fighter jet.
Last month, the Dutch government, which led an international investigation because the flight departed from Amsterdam, concluded that the deadly missile had been brought to eastern Ukraine from Russia and fired from a village under the control of separatists.
“We have no doubt whatsoever that conclusions we are presenting today are accurate,” the head of the Dutch National Detective Force told reporters.
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