Several Republicans are among a group of former cabinet officers, senior officials and career military officers who denounced Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on Thursday, calling his recent remarks on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and Russian Federation “disgraceful”.
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The Republican candidate for US president, Donald Trump, has said that, if elected, he would consider recognizing Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula.
Trump, on the other hand, told ABC’s “This Week” in a broadcast Sunday that he wants to take a look at whether the United States should recognize Crimea as part of Russian Federation.
The White House has declined to speculate on who was behind the hack of Democratic Party computers, referring to an ongoing investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Some pundits the leaks were part of a plot by Russian Federation to influence the presidential election.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said he has no relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin as being alleged by his opponents.
When he was asked during an interview with ABC’s This Week whether he would support the annexation, Trump said: “I’m going to take a look at it”.
Critics accuse Trump of bowing down to Russian President Vladimir Putin and betraying America’s allies.
Trump last week invited Russian Federation to dig up tens of thousands of “missing” emails from Clinton’s time at the U.S. state department. “So with all of these strong ties to Nato, Ukraine is a mess”, Trump said.
“I was not involved in that”, Trump said.
Trump also pushed back against the criticism during a campaign event Monday in Columbus, Ohio. “It’s an interesting speculative question for the press”, he told NBC’s Meet the Press.
Trump also told ABC that he was planning to look into the idea of recognizing Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and that “from what he’d heard”, the people of Crimea would prefer to be part of Russian Federation.
In fact, there were two Trump campaign staffers in the room when a committee of GOP delegates debated the national security platform the week before the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.
During a press conference in Florida on Wednesday, Trump voiced the hope that Russian Federation would release the texts of more than 30,000 emails which Clinton says she deleted – on the basis they were personal and not work-related – after using a private server while secretary of state.
Donald Trump is trying to claw back a string of inaccurate comments about Ukraine, but he’s yet to get it right. “Does he not know that?”
“This is scary stuff”, Clinton campaign spokesman Jake Sullivan said in a statement. “More than anyone else I have ever met, Trump has the ability to convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment is true, or sort of true, or at least ought to be true”.
“Just so you understand, he said very nice things about me”.
Such comments often leave his campaign to try to toughen the rhetoric.
Mr Trump acknowledged in the ABC interview that the language had been watered down, but he said he had nothing to do with it.
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At a rally in the USA state of OH on Monday Trump once again attempted to explain his words by implying that he did not support restoring Ukraine’s control of Crimea, because it would trigger a global conflict.
