Trump's ties to Putin under fresh scrutiny in
wake of Russia bounty reports
Russia allegedly paid bounties for deaths of US
soldiers
David Smith
in Washington
@smithinamerica
Tue 30 Jun
2020 22.01 BSTFirst published on Tue 30 Jun 2020 18.41 BST
Donald
Trump is facing renewed questions over his relationship with Vladimir Putin
after reports that he was briefed in writing in February that Russia paid
bounties for the deaths of US soldiers in Afghanistan.
After a
meeting at the White House on Tuesday, Democratic members of Congress insisted
the president must at least have been aware of the allegation against Moscow,
yet failed to act.
“Based on
what we heard today, it was information that a) the president should have known
about and b) based on what we were told today, he did,” Adam Smith, chairman of
the House armed services committee, told reporters.
Classified
US reports suggested a Russian military intelligence unit offered bounties to
Taliban-linked militants to kill US and allied forces in Afghanistan, the New
York Times reported last week.
The April
2019 killing of three US marines after a car rigged with explosives detonated
near their vehicles as they returned to Bagram airfield in Afghanistan is seen
as one possible result of the programme, which the Kremlin has denied.
The damning
allegations have revived familiar questions from American political scandals:
what did the president know and when did he know it?
Trump has
long faced scrutiny for his warm relationship with Putin, including a refusal
to accept his own intelligence agencies’ conclusion that Moscow intervened on
his behalf in the 2016 presidential election; calls for Russia to rejoin the
Group of Seven (G7) leading industrial nations; and the dispatch of ventilators
to Russia to combat the coronavirus pandemic.
Trump and
Putin spoke by phone six times between 30 March and 1 June – an unusually high
number – apparently without the Afghanistan issue being mentioned.
On Monday,
the Times reported that information on the bounties was included in a daily
written report delivered to the president in late February, with one unnamed
official specifying 27 February – a date on which Trump hosted controversial
celebrity supporters Diamond and Silk at the White House.
Separately,
the Associated Press said senior officials in the White House were aware in
early 2019 of the intelligence, and the assessment was included in at least one
of Trump’s written daily briefings at the time. John Bolton, then national
security adviser, told colleagues at the time he briefed Trump on the
intelligence assessment in March 2019, the AP added.
Trump said
on Sunday he was not told of the allegations because the information was not
“credible”. The White House has claimed there was no consensus among
intelligence agencies. The administration is yet to address whether Trump
received a written report or if he read it.
At Monday’s
White House briefing, the press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, was asked if the
information was contained in the president’s daily brief, a summary of
high-level information and analysis on national security issues. She replied,
carefully: “He was not personally briefed on the matter” and repeated on
Tuesday that Trump “was never briefed”.
White House
officials briefed Democrats only after sharing information with Republicans on
Monday.
After
Tuesday’s meeting, Adam Schiff, chairman of the House intelligence committee,
told reporters: “As we look at these allegations, number one the president of
the United States should not be inviting Russia into the G7 or G8. We should be
considering what sanctions are appropriate to further deter Russia’s malign
activities.”
Schiff, who
prosecuted the impeachment case against Trump over a quid pro quo with Ukraine,
added: “There may be a reluctance to brief the president on things he doesn’t
want to hear and that may be more true with respect to Putin and Putin’s Russia
than with respect to any other subject matter. Many of us do not understand his
affinity for that autocratic ruler who means our nation ill.”
Schiff
called on Trump to consider imposing new economic sanctions on Russia, as did
former national security adviser, John Bolton, who has published a damning book
on the president, which suggests Trump is not fit for office.
Ruben
Gallego, a member of the armed services committee, told MSNBC: “It is clear
that this president has warped the information stream. Because of his love of
Putin and Russia, it has made it more difficult, in my opinion, for briefers
and people that inform the president of what is happening to keep him up to
date on Russian activity, and that has caused a lot of problems.”
Hillary
Clinton tweeted of Trump: “Either he knew and chose to do nothing, or he didn’t
know because he couldn’t be bothered to do his job.”
The New
York Times further reported on Tuesday that US intelligence picked up transfers
of large sums from Russian military intelligence to Taliban-linked bank
accounts.
Trump’s
handling of diplomatic relations took another hit on Monday when Carl Bernstein,
the veteran journalist who reported on the Watergate scandal that brought down
Richard Nixon, published a report online for CNN.
“In
hundreds of highly classified phone calls with foreign heads of state,”
Bernstein wrote, citing as sources unnamed White House and intelligence
officials, Trump “was so consistently unprepared for discussion of serious
issues, so often outplayed in his conversations with powerful leaders like
Russian president Vladimir Putin and Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and
so abusive to leaders of America’s principal allies, that the calls helped
convince some senior US officials … that the president himself posed a danger
to the national security of the United States”.
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