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Tuesday 17 July 2018
Trump beholden to Putin? Summit does nothing to dispel impression
The US president fails to stand up for national interests during bewildering press conference
Luke Harding
The US president, Donald Trump, and the Russian president, Vladimir
Putin, adjust their earpieces during a joint press conference following
their summit talks in Helsinki.
Photograph: Anatoly Maltsev/EPA
Donald Trump’s press conference with Vladimir Putin
will go down in history as one of the most astonishing ever. The US
president took Putin’s side over that of his own intelligence community,
and refused to acknowledge that Russia hacked the 2016 presidential election.
When asked point-blank to condemn Moscow’s meddling in US democracy,
Trump couldn’t bring himself to do so. For two years, Trump has faced
claims that he was beholden to Russia and in some intangible way even controlled by it. Monday’s press conference did nothing to banish this impression.
Hacking
The trickiest part of the summit concerned the Kremlin’s hacking of
Democratic party emails, which were released in 2016 to damage Hillary Clinton
when she was the party’s presidential candidate. Robert Mueller, the
special prosecutor, on Friday accused 12 Russian military intelligence
officers of carrying it out. He gave granular detail in the indictment
of how the operation was done. On Monday, however, Trump refused to
condemn the attack or even accept Russia was behind it. Instead, Trump
said that both sides – Washington and Moscow – had “made mistakes”. He
added: “I don’t see any reason why they [the Russians] would have done
it.”
Trump then launched an attack on the FBI and wanted to know why it
had failed to find Clinton’s “missing” 33,000 emails. Trump was unable
to move beyond the campaign rhetoric of 2016 or stand up for US national
interests. His critics, including the former CIA director John Brennan,
saw this as nothing less than treason. If Trump is impeached, this clip will play in all subsequent TV dramas and documentaries. Extradition
One
of the big questions pre-summit was whether Trump would call for the
extradition to the US of the 12 Russian spies indicted by Mueller. He
didn’t. When the subject came up in the question and answer session,
Putin sought to throw the accusation back. He said he would investigate
the report and even offered to “cooperate”. The Kremlin, he said, would
allow Mueller’s team to visit Moscow and to question suspects. In
return, however, it wanted access to Bill Browder, a US-born British
financier who is a Kremlin bogeyman. Putin was well aware that Mueller’s
investigators won’t be visiting Russian anytime soon. He extended a
similar offer in 2006 to Scotland Yard following the radioactive murder
of Alexander Litvinenko
using a cup of tea. The detectives who flew to Moscow found themselves
in a PR pantomime, with their efforts to get evidence thwarted by the
state.
Kompromat
Does Moscow have compromising information on Trump? The question has
haunted the president since publication, in January 2017, of the dossier
by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. Asked about
this, Putin said he did not know Trump was in Moscow when the future US
president visited Russia in 2013 for the Miss Universe beauty contest.
”Please disregard these issues,” he said. This was a classic non-denial
answer. And a lie. Putin knew of Trump’s trip at the time, had tentative
plans to meet him and sent Trump a gift. Asked about kompromat, Trump
said that if it did exist “it would have come out by now”.
Collusion
Trump again denied that there had been any collusion between his
campaign and Russia. This was, he said, a pathetic excuse by the
Democrats who should have won the election but failed to do so. Plus, he
said, “there was no one to collude with”. Putin agreed. He said there
was no evidence. And added that Mueller’s claims should be tested in
court, rather than taken for granted. Even so, Putin made one
interesting admission. Asked if he wanted Trump to win in 2016, he
replied: “Yes, I did”. Russia’s president said he backed Trump as a
candidate because Trump wanted to normalise relations with Russia. This
is as close as Putin has come to admitting he favoured one candidate
over the other.
Key moments from the Trump-Putin press conference - video
The world
Putin’s opening statement featured a boilerplate list of international issues – arms control, counter-terrorism, Iran, North Korea and Syria.
He said a bilateral group of experts could meet to discuss
international problems – including cybersecurity. Trump’s list was far
shorter. He said nothing about Ukraine. The Obama administration imposed sanctions on Russia in 2014, after Putin annexed Crimea
and started a covert war in the east of the country. Putin defended his
decision to seize Crimea, while Trump stayed silent. The US president
also had nothing to say about the attempted murder of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury with the military-grade nerve agent novichok, or the apparently collateral death this month of Dawn Sturgess. Britain’s prime minister, Theresa May,
had explicitly asked Trump to raise the attempted assassination when
she held talks with the US president last week – apparently in vain.
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