“When you look at Vladimir Putin, you say he’s a great leader for his country, but he’s also a guy…”
Advertisement
“We can not imagine them sitting in the pub, drinking beer, or vodka, or whiskey or whatever”, he said of Clinton and Putin. US handling of such attacks in the past has not been inspiring. Clinton is thought to be the next in line, and maybe worse. “I’m pretty sure that any US government will pay full respect to those decisions”, he told reporters.
“I would treat Vladimir Putin firmly”, said the Republican nominee, adding that he would rather have a friendly Russian Federation to “knock out ISIS together”. It doesn’t help Clinton’s image inside the Kremlin that she voiced support, however quietly, for anti-Putin protesters in late 2011, when she was serving as Secretary of State.
Trump later wrote on his Twitter page that if “Russia or any other country or person” has Clinton’s “illegally deleted emails”, they should hand them over to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
“Of course I’m being sarcastic”, Mr Trump told Fox News. Conventional (pun intended) wisdom is that presidential candidates let the opposing party have the spotlight during their conventions. “He’s a really brilliant and talented person, without any doubt”, Putin told reporters, later adding, “(H) e’s the absolute leader in the presidential race”.
A United States official said Thursday there was “little doubt” Russian Federation was behind the DNC hack, prompting some Democrats to allege that Moscow is trying to tilt the election in Trump’s favor.
And now, just like the Russian “patriots” who always blame everything on the omnipresent U.S. State Department, American Democrats have tried to turn their in-party debacle into an electoral advantage by claiming that Russian President Vladimir Putin is responsible for the hackers breaking into party correspondence – hackers, that is, from the FSB or the GRU, the main intelligence agency.
But Democrats aren’t buying Trump’s revision of comments he made Wednesday, and his initial statement is nearly certain to be thrust back into the spotlight when Clinton accepts the Democratic presidential nomination on Thursday night.
To imagine Putin engaging Trump in a covert alliance is to see the discipline and coherence of a master strategist where there is, most likely, the opportunism and appetite for risk of a high-stakes gambler. Sixteen years into his rule, Putin does not have “a regular regime, with a normally functioning bureaucracy and institutions-everything has an improvisational character”, Pavlovsky said. Russian Federation could have been trying to influence the election on behalf of Trump, if they carried it, or to make mischief more generally and create chaos during the election. “But he is not going to do it himself”.
The affair is a lesson for Trump in how every word a potential commander in chief utters is parsed and amplified, and can have significant political and diplomatic consequences. “I said he’s a better leader than Obama, because Obama’s not a leader, so he’s certainly doing a better job than Obama is, and that’s all”.
“He may be able to try to pull it back now and try to suggest it was humor, but there are some things that a person who aspires be president cannot ultimately even say in humor”, the senator said. “Americans should choose whomever they want”, he told me.
U.S. officials believe that the hacking likely originated in Russian Federation, opening the possibility that it was the result of an espionage operation.
Pointing the finger at Russian Federation isn’t as simple as blaming North Korea, given Russia’s significant diplomatic clout and America’s dependence on it for critical national security matters. How could either one ever give in to the other?
“It’s simply because it shows how little respect they have for our country”, Trump said at a news conference. But members of Russia’s ruling class don’t think about the long term.
Yet, as experts increasingly link Russia to hacks of U.S. government systems, the Obama administration has been using stronger language to describe Russian behavior.
Amidst the denunciation of Trump’s statements Wednesday, his campaign pointed to Clinton’s use of personal server for official business as secretary of state despite handling sensitive classified information in that role and the thousands of emails she didn’t hand over to the State Department while destroying the server itself – the very emails Trump was referring to.
Advertisement
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is trying to quell the furore over his call to Russian Federation to find Hillary Clinton’s deleted emails by saying he was being sarcastic.
