Trump has spoken admiringly of Putin, despite USA intelligence reports that say the Russian leader ordered an intelligence operation meant to interfere in the US presidential campaign. While Tillerson says it is better to be involved in the Paris discussions, Trump has said he would cancel the agreement.
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Mr Tillerson is a former ExxonMobil CEO and is a controversial appointment because of concerns about his closeness to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The ExxonMobil CEO faced a tough grilling Wednesday, particularly from Florida GOP Sen. As we warned from the outset, Tillerson’s biggest negative is his close ties to Putin – he received Russia’s Order of Friendship in 2013. Murphy asked Tillerson after he had said he wouldn’t commit to continuing the sanctions President Barack Obama ordered last month. Tillerson said Kaine should ask the company’s current leadership.
Maybe Tillerson didn’t project a tougher stance on Russian Federation because he knew how unconvincing he sounded when he did.
“I abhor the Klan and its hateful ideology”, Sessions said. The subtext of the language is that the United States tolerates cyberattacks from competitors and rivals around the world without always responding harshly; thus, slapping sanctions on Russian Federation shouldn’t be considered the only course of action in response. And during his hearing Wednesday, Tillerson refused to call Putin a “war criminal” when Sen.
Corker’s office and Trump’s transition team did not immediately respond to requests to clarify the details of the two men’s conversation on sanctions or Tillerson’s statements on Exxon’s past lobbying on sanctions. He said he “would have recommended that Ukraine take all of the military assets that it had available” and put them along the eastern border.
TILLERSON: I will rely on multiple sources to confirm what I am being told.
Even as the company has more recently publicly recognized the reality of the crisis and issued statements in support of the Paris Agreement, it’s now under investigation by the NY attorney general and others for misleading investors and the public about the threat of a changing climate and what it knew.
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However, Tillerson attempted to show that he cared about the current impacts of climate change by saying that he wanted to be actively involved in worldwide climate treaties and other global efforts to reverse the impacts of global warming, The Atlantic reported. “Our ability to predict that effect is very limited [and the action nations should take] seems to be the largest area of debate existing in the public discourse”.
