Trump accuses Obama of rigging Russia investigation
The president also praised Putin and told Hannity that the Mueller probe is hurting U.S.-Russia relations.
FBI agent Peter Strzok, a former member of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation team, has long been a target of conservatives, who claim his previous anti-Trump texts to a colleague with whom he was having an affair prove the Russia investigation is nothing more than a political witch-hunt. Trump has repeatedly echoed those claims, suggesting Strzok wanted to prevent him from winning the presidency and that the investigation is baseless, despite the numerous indictments Mueller’s team has handed down over the past year.
On Monday night, following his diplomatic summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Finland, Trump took things a step further by implying his predecessor had directly ordered Strzok to rig the investigation against him.
After calling Strzok “a disgrace to our country,” Trump added, “You have to find out — who did Peter Strzok report to? Because it was James Comey and it was (former FBI Deputy Director Andrew) McCabe, but it was also probably Obama. If you think that Obama didn’t know what was going on….”
Trump offered no evidence to back that claim, appearing to make it up on the spot.
Trump previously accused Obama of spying on him, suggesting in March last year that the former president had wiretapped his offices in Trump Tower during the 2016 election — a claim that was later debunked by the Justice Department.
Trump had kinder words for Putin, who he praised as “very, very strong.” He then paraphrased Putin’s comments describing Mueller’s investigation as a “phony witch hunt,” saying the Russian president had told him it was preventing them from striking any deals, such as the “safety of nuclear.”
“President Putin said, one of the early things he said when we started, he said it’s really a shame because we could do so much good, whether it is humanitarian aid throughout the Middle East, whether it’s not just Syria, so many different things. The safety of nuclear, which ultimately, there is nothing bigger and more important,” he said. “And they drove a phony wedge, just a phony witch hunt, a rigged deal with guys like Peter Strzok and Comey and McCabe. The whole group. And you can imagine who else. It’s a real shame.”
Trump also said Putin was angry to hear about salacious allegations from the Steele dossier, which Russia’s president claimed were not true.
“It makes him angry when he sees it,” he said. “You know it’s very interesting — you look at what’s happening, you look at what — that whole thing. He understood it. And he was — I don’t know if you could see it — he was incensed even talking about it.”
Trump seized the moment to once again publicize Putin’s offer to help “analyze” U.S. intelligence on 12 GRU officers — Russian military intelligence — who Mueller indicted Friday for their alleged roles in hacking the DNC and DCCC servers, as well as the email accounts of Hillary Clinton campaign staffers.
“He’s willing to take those 12 people, there is no extradition,” Trump said. “But he is willing to let Robert Mueller’s people go over there and bring a big investigation of those people, working together with the Russian investigators.”
Monday’s interview was recorded shortly after Trump’s disastrous joint press conference with the Russian leader, who the U.S. intelligence community has “assessed with high confidence” directed a covert attack on the 2016 American election to help Trump.
Despite the intelligence community’s assessment, Trump has continued to downplay the threat Russia and Putin pose, choosing instead to paint his friendly relationship with the autocratic leader as diplomatic bridge-building.
https://thinkprogress.org/donald-trump-sean-hannity-fox-news-vladimir-putin-barack-obama-robert-mueller-64c19150ed79/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=tp-letters
I agree with Tom Friedman entirely on his take on Trump:
From
the beginning of his administration, President Trump has responded to
every new bit of evidence from the C.I.A., F.B.I. and N.S.A. that Russia
intervened in our last election on his behalf by either attacking
Barack Obama or the Democrats for being too lax — never President
Vladimir Putin of Russia for his unprecedented cyberhit on our
democratic process. Such behavior by an American president is so
perverse, so contrary to American interests and values, that it leads to
only one conclusion: Donald Trump is either an asset of Russian
intelligence or really enjoys playing one on TV.
Everything
that happened in Helsinki today only reinforces that conclusion. My
fellow Americans, we are in trouble and we have some big decisions to
make today. This was a historic moment in the entire history of the
United States.
There is overwhelming
evidence that our president, for the first time in our history, is
deliberately or through gross negligence or because of his own twisted
personality engaged in treasonous behavior — behavior that violates his
oath of office to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the
United States.”
Trump vacated that
oath today, and Republicans can no longer run and hide from that fact.
Every single Republican lawmaker will be — and should be — asked on the
election trail: Are you with Trump and Putin or are you with the C.I.A.,
F.B.I. and N.S.A.?
It
started with the shocking tweet that Trump issued before he even sat
down with Putin this morning: “Our relationship with Russia has NEVER
been worse thanks to many years of U.S. foolishness and stupidity and
now, the Rigged Witch Hunt!” The official Twitter account of the Russian
foreign ministry — recognizing a useful idiot when it saw one —
immediately “liked” Trump’s tweet and later added: “We agree.”
I’ll bet they do.
It
only got worse when, in his joint news conference with Putin, Trump was
asked explicitly if he believed the conclusion of his intelligence
agencies that Russia hacked our elections. The president of the United
States basically threw his entire intelligence establishment under a
bus, while throwing out a cloud of dust about Hillary Clinton’s server
to disguise what he was doing.
Trump
actually said on the question of who hacked our election, “I don’t see
any reason why it would be” Russia. And in a bit of shocking moral
equivalence, Trump added of the United States and Russia: “We are all to
blame … both made some mistakes.” Trump said that it was actually the
American probe into the Russian hacking that has “kept us apart.”
To
watch an American president dis his own intelligence agencies, blame
both sides for the Russian hacking of our election — and deliberately
try to confuse the fact that there is still no solid proof of collusion
between the Trump campaign and Russia with the fact that Russia had its own interest in
trying to defeat the anti-Putin Hillary Clinton — actually made me sick
to my stomach. I completely endorse the former C.I.A. director John O.
Brennan’s tweet after the news conference:
“Donald
Trump’s press conference performance in Helsinki rises to & exceeds
the threshold of ‘high crimes & misdemeanors.’ It was nothing short
of treasonous. Not only were Trump’s comments imbecilic, he is wholly
in the pocket of Putin. Republican Patriots: Where are you???”
Trump
is simply insanely obsessed with what happened in the last election.
But now he is president, and the fact that he may not have colluded with
the Russians doesn’t mean he does not, as president, have a
responsibility to ensure that the Russians be punished for interfering
in our last election on their own and be effectively deterred from doing
so in the future. That is in his job description.
Listening
to Trump, it was as if Franklin Roosevelt had announced after Pearl
Harbor: “Hey, both sides are to blame. Our battleships in Hawaii were a
little provocative to Japan — and, by the way, I had nothing to do with
the causes for their attack. So cool it.”
There
is only one message Trump should have sent Putin in this meeting today:
“You have attacked our democracy, as well as two core pillars of the
global economic and security order that have kept the peace and promoted
prosperity since World War II — the European Union and NATO. We are not
interested in any of your poker-faced denials. Just know that if you
keep doing it, we will consider it an act of war and we will not only
sanction you like never before, but you’ll taste every cyberweapon we
have in our arsenal — and some of your most intimate personal secrets
will appear on the front pages of every newspaper in the world. Is there
any part of that sentence you do not understand?
“So
we will be watching you between now and our midterm elections,” Trump
should have added. “I’m sure you know the date. If you behave well,
we’ll talk again in December 2018 about anything you want — Ukraine,
Syria, Crimea or arms control. Until then our C.I.A. and N.S.A. are on
to you and your cyberspooks. And Vlad, as you may have noticed from my
Justice Department’s recent indictment of 12 of your agents, you are not
as good as you think.”
That is what a
real American president, sworn to protect and defend the Constitution,
would have said to Putin today. He would have understood that this
meeting had only one agenda item — and it was not developing an
“extraordinary” relationship.
It was d-e-t-e-r-r-e-n-c-e — deterrence of a Russia that has been increasingly reckless and destabilizing.
In
the past few years what has Putin done to deserve an American president
sucking up to him for an “extraordinary” relationship? Putin has seized
Crimea, covertly invaded Ukraine, provided the missiles that shot down a
civilian Malaysian airliner over Ukraine, bombed tens of thousands of
refugees out of Syria into Europe, destabilizing Europe, been involved
in the death of a British woman who accidentally handled a Russian nerve
agent deployed to kill ex-Russian agents in England and deployed
misinformation to help tip the vote in Britain toward exiting and
fracturing the European Union.
Most
of all, Putin unleashed a cyberattack on America’s electoral process,
aimed at both electing Trump — with or without Trump’s collusion — and
sowing division among American citizens.
Our
intelligence agencies have no doubt about this: Last week, America’s
director of national intelligence, Dan Coats, described Putin’s
cybercampaign as one designed “to exploit America’s openness in order to
undermine our long-term competitive advantage.” Coats added that
America’s digital infrastructure “is literally under attack,” adding
that there was “no question” that Russia was the “most aggressive
foreign actor.”
I am not given to
conspiracy theories, but I cannot help wondering if the first thing
Trump said to Putin in their private one-on-one meeting in Helsinki,
before their aides were allowed to enter, was actually: “Vladimir, we’re
still good, right? You and me, we’re still good?”
And that Putin answered: “Donald, you have nothing to worry about. Just keep being yourself. We’re still good.”