“With all the strength that you’re talking about, and with all the power of North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, and all of this, in the mean time, [Putin] takes Crimea”.
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A major political party just spent an entire week nominating and celebrating the first female candidate with a serious chance of winning the White House.
Two U.S. intelligence officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the hack could be part of a broader campaign by Russian President Vladimir Putin to push back against what he thinks is an effort by the European Union and NATO, a military alliance of European and North American democracies, to encircle and weaken Russia. “But I was not involved in it”, Trump responded.
“He’s not going into Ukraine, just so you understand”.
But on one topic, Trump is conspicuously incurious: the suggestion that he is complicit in a plan by Vladimir Putin to influence the USA election. Afterwards, political experts declared victory for the Democrats when they described the DNC as portraying American values and the RNC as being centered on Russian Federation and Trump, as conservative blogger AGConservative tweeted to TalkingPointsMemo. This is one more example of a man who unabashedly puts personal gain above the security interests of his country.
Other Democrats were more concerned with Trump’s cavalier attitude than any accusation of treason or association with Russian Federation. “Let’s see if that happens”, which apparently according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation has already happened as part of the great game that Putin is playing to help Trump become the next President of the United States.
Asked on CBS’ “Face the Nation” about similarities between him and Putin, Trump pointed to their appearance on same edition of “60 Minutes”. (Try telling that to Ukraine.) Another Trump foreign policy advisor, retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, flew to Moscow previous year to attend a gala banquet celebrating Russia Today, the Kremlin’s propaganda channel, and was seated at the head table near Putin. The Cold War ended with Soviet collapse, but Putin is determined to reassert hegemony over the “near overseas”, the old Soviet republics, in his unrelenting campaign to restore Russia’s lost prestige. “When we had the Miss Universe contest a number of years ago, we had Miss Universe in Moscow, in the Moscow area, he was invited”.
And indeed, since the 1980s, Trump and his family have repeatedly visited Moscow in search of business opportunities, according to a detailed Washington Post study.
Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort has also had extensive business dealings in Russian Federation, as have other Trump advisers. He was overthrown by popular revolt in 2014, after which Putin seized Crimea and invaded eastern Ukraine. Keep this one in mind.
Yet Democrats are not the only ones to recoil at Trump’s remarks. But fast-forward to the past couple of weeks and you get a few clues. The tax returns that he refuses to release would reveal Trump’s dependence on investments from Russian oligarchs close to Putin.
Meanwhile, Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, worked in 2010 for pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovych, a Putin ally, helping him win an election as Ukraine’s president.
“I’ve never met Putin”. “She’s a very dishonest person”.
Clinton senior policy advisor Jake Sullivan called Trump’s statement “scary stuff”.
“And as far as the Ukraine is concerned, it’s a mess”.
“Russia is already in Ukraine”.
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And why did Trump propose changing North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and Ukraine policy in ways that would benefit Putin?
