Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump teamed up to attack Democrats during a joint press conference and cast doubt on the intelligence community’s findings about Russian election hacking
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ConspiracyCon 2018: When the AP asked Trump whether he believed the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment that Russia hacked the DNC, Trump would not say “yes.” Instead, he launched into a diatribe against his own officials, criticized the FBI for not obtaining the physical server, aired a number of debunked conspiracy theories about the investigation, and blasted Democrats for pursuing the Russia inquiry (they “want to do nothing but resist and obstruct").
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Trump followed up the grievance stream-of-consciousness with a no-confidence vote in his own Director of National Intelligence. “[Daniel] Coats says they think it’s Russia, Putin says its not Russia. I don’t see any reason why it would be.” Put briefly: Trump signaled he trusts Putin’s government more than his own
Private time: The two leaders discussed quite a bit during their private meeting but the discussion of the DNC hacking was the most pressing issue. Trump said he and Putin spent a "great deal of time talking about it" and that his message was best "delivered in person." For his part, Putin appeared to offer Special Counsel Robert Mueller access to interview the 12 GRU officers indicted for hacking the DNC. That access, however, would come with strings. Putin said he expected reciprocal access for Russian law enforcement.
In particular, he wanted to interview allies of longtime Putin antagonist Bill Browder, the investor who helped push the Magnitsky sanctions against Russia for its imprisonment and murder of a Russian dissident. In the process of laying into Browder, he threw a bone to Trump, ever hungry for a whataboutist election conspiracy about Hillary Clinton, by saying that money withdrawn from Russia by Browder’s allies may have been illegally contributed to Hillary Clinton’s political campaign.
Return of the “impenetrable cybersecurity unit”: Putin once again floated the possibility of forming a “joint working group on cybersecurity.” You may remember this as the “impenetrable cybersecurity unit” Trump enthusiastically tweeted about after his last meeting with Putin at the G20. That idea never went anywhere. It’s unclear whether it’ll find legs the second time around.
The dog ate my homework: If you thought that President Trump would want to do a lot of prep work before a major summit meeting with a nuclear-armed rival at the center of a number of U.S. foreign policy problems, you’d be wrong. The New Yorker revealed this weekend that National Security Advisor John Bolton has not called a single principals meeting—a meeting of senior cabinet heads—to help prepare. In other words, Trump, who tends to skip briefing materials as a matter of course, is walking into a meeting virtually alone with little agenda or prep work.
The official agenda: Trump’s schedule today lists three items of note: a “1:1 bilateral meeting” with Putin, followed by “an expanded bilateral meeting and working lunch” with the Russian president, and then a joint press conference. The one-on-one—held only with translators and no staff—blew through its allotted 90 minutes. According to President Trump, the two had plenty on the agenda, from “trade to military to missiles to nuclear to China.” According to Putin, the two discussed a range of issues from an extension of the New START nuclear weapons treaty, accusations that Russia was violating the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces treaty, setting up a counterterrorism coordination working group, and discussing Syria, Ukraine, North Korea, and the Iran nuclear deal.
Putin’s agenda: CNBC got a sneak peak at a U.S. intelligence assessment of what Putin is looking for out of the summit. Sources tell the news outlet he is looking for three things: a U.S. military withdrawal from Syria, a diplomatic withdrawal of support from Ukraine, and continued U.S. engagement with North Korea. In other words, Putin is lobbying Trump for a smaller U.S. presence around the world.
Extradition: Speaking of the GRU indictment, Trump originally told CBS News that the idea of asking Russia to extradite the 12 indicted Russian spies accused of hacking the DNC is something he “hadn’t thought about.” Bolton, however, has ruled the idea out entirely. He told ABC News on Sunday that “I think it’s pretty silly for the president to demand something that he can’t get legally. And this is a very serious matter, you know the Russians take the position, you can—you can like it or not like it, that their constitution forbids them to extradite Russian citizens.”
That may be true, but as the Arms Control Association’s Kingston Reif points out, it’s not the tune Bolton was singing in 2013. Back then, Bolton criticized President Barack Obama for not doing enough to get NSA leaker Edward Snowden extradited. In a column for Human Events, Bolton wrote that Obama “should have concentrated his efforts, with a clear, forceful message: we want Snowden and we want him now.”
The damage is already done: The Putin summit is a lot like Trump’s Kim Jong Un summit in that deliverable agenda items—for either party—aren’t as important as the fact that the meeting itself took place. Putin, like Kim, is the leader of a country heavily sanctioned by the U.S. A media spectacle of a summit helps Putin domestically and gives him the ability to tell Russians that their isolation and economic misfortunes—borne of his decision to annex Crimea—may soon be at an end. It also flatters the wounded imperial ego of Russia and brings back nostalgic memories of the Yalta summit, when Moscow, now greatly diminished in power and prestige, could meet with America as an equal to decide the fate of the world.
Bad timing: The Justice Department’s indictment of the GRU officers behind the 2016 DNC hack on Friday cast a pall over the summit and made it look that much more like unilateral capitulation on Trump’s part. But there’s also the issue of the Sergei Skripal poisoning in Salisbury, England with a top-secret Russian chemical weapon. The New York Times reported on Sunday that U.S. intelligence now believes the GRU was also responsible for despatching the assassins who tried to kill Skripal.
Odd woman out: The working lunch featured an expanded U.S. cast including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, Chief of Staff John Kelly, U.S. Ambassador to Russia Jon Huntsman, Trump’s translator and NSC Senior Director for European and Russian Affairs Fiona Hill. While her portfolio and expertise mark her as a natural for the meeting, Hill, an avowed Russia hawk and a pick of ousted former National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, is an odd fit in a room full of MAGA enthusiasts. Trump aides had previously tried to get Hill in the room for one-on-one meetings with Trump and Putin in order to provide some spine and expertise but failed for Trump’s sideline meeting with Putin at the G20.
Trump reportedly has a strained relationship with Hill and viewed her staff as a potential source of leaks about his disclosure of classified information about ISIS intelligence to the Russian foreign minister. The day before Trump left for the summit, the White House kneecapped Hill’s staff by firing her top deputy, Army Colonel Richard Hooker.
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