Trump’s urging came as he rejected the growing USA government consensus that Russian Federation was behind the hack of the Democratic National Committee – a stunning display of a foreign power’s meddling in a us presidential election.
Advertisement
Pointing the finger and alleging that Putin is in cahoots with Wikileaks (who never reveal their sources – for obvious reasons), Guccifer 2.0 (who denies any Russian involvement) or some other intel snoop misses the point entirely – the emails are legitimate and factual. But that’s not what he publicly stated just two years ago.
Trump’s talk about Russian Federation raising new questions about his relationship with its president, Vladimir Putin. He added that the USA knows that “Russians hack our systems – not just government systems, but private systems”. The smoke and mirrors used by the Democrats year after year to cover for the political elite will not work this time!
More from NJ Patch here, Politico here, and RedState here. “They are trying to kill the sanctions with a softly, softly approach”, one diplomat said.
Russian Federation told the United States on Thursday to get to the bottom of of its own hacking scandal.
“In their view it is fair play”.
Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and now a Senior Fellow at the Washington-based Brookings Institution think tank, told DW: “Irrespective of who’s behind that initiative and of what the motives are, ultimately the platform is different from what a number of leading Republicans had called for in Congress – military aid for Ukraine, in the form of lethal weapons”.
“He’s running his country and at least he’s a leader, unlike what we have in this country”, Trump said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”.
In an obvious case of sarcasm, Mr. Trump recently joked that maybe the Russians might know what’s in the 30,000 deleted emails wiped off of Hillary Clinton’s private server that the Federal Bureau of Investigation could not recover.
Trump, whose wife Melania was born in the town of Sevnica while Slovenia was still part of Communist-run Yugoslavia, has sided with Putin on a wide range of issues, including saying that, if elected, he would consider recognizing Crimea as Russian territory and would not necessarily back North Atlantic Treaty Organisation members if Putin made a decision to invade. But Greene said he thought what would matter most to Moscow would simply be to destabilize and to ensure that whoever won on November 8 emerged as a weak figure.
He needs the West to lift the sanctions it imposed on Russian Federation over its 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine, which have cut off access to Western credit markets and technology imports.
Above all, though, he wants to make sure that external forces do not derail his own push for continued dominance in a political landscape where the liberal opposition is nearly completely absent from TV screens and parliament.
“Putin and Hillary Clinton don’t have a very good history in their personal relations”, he says.
But Mischenko says many Russian political experts still view the NY billionaire with caution.
“Russia, if you are listening”, Trump told reporters Wednesday, “I hope you are able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing”.
“It’s pure politics, it’s not about military secrets”. He has also declined to say how WikiLeaks got the documents and would not say whether Guccifer 2.0 was involved.
Trump has already raised hackles in Ukraine by saying he would be willing to consider lifting sanctions. It has previously been accused of deploying that capability in Estonia, Georgia and Ukraine. Russian military intelligence, GRU, is known to have similar capabilities, Soldatov said.
Advertisement
“The President might have forgotten that the USA and Israel were responsible for a joint Stuxnet project, a malicious computer worm hack against Iran in 2013 that, according to cyber security expert Ralph Langer “was far more unsafe than the cyber weapon that is now lodged in the public’s imagination” and ‘changed global military strategy in the 21st century”.
