When it comes to Russia, Donald Trump won’t listen to anyone except himself — and, maybe, Vladimir Putin.
The current discord over evidence that Russia paid the Taliban to kill American troops in Afghanistan is merely the latest case in point.
“In morning tweets on Wednesday, Trump continued to dismiss media reports on the episode, writing that ‘this is all a made up Fake News Media Hoax started to slander me & the Republican Party,’” the Washington Post reported on Wednesday.
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) says in a Wednesday tweet that Trump’s “cowardice and bizarre fealty to Russia is putting our troops in danger.”
Trump “insists he never saw the intelligence, though it was part of the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) just days before a peace deal was signed with the Taliban in February,” say David Sanger and Eric Schmitt, in a New York Times analysis.
(That warning was not delivered vocally to the president; it was in writing, in the PDB — which his former national security adviser, John Bolton, says Trump rarely reads.)
Some Trump officials appear to be setting the stage for a campaign of silence on the cash-for-killing episode — by blaming leaks to the news media for the whole thing.
“Sadly, because of the leak, it may now become impossible ever to get to the bottom of this, to get to the truth of the matter, and that’s one of the very sad things,” national security adviser Robert O’Brien said in an interview on Fox News.
“We were working very hard on this matter,” O’Brien insisted. “It might be impossible to get to the bottom of it because someone decided to leak to hurt the president rather than uphold their obligations to the American people.”
Reporting on O’Brien’s remarks, CBS News White House correspondent Mark Knoller says the president has now been “fully briefed” on the Russian bounties report.
In Congress, a bipartisan effort to gain additional information was revealed in a Wednesday morning conference call.
In that call, Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO) said he expects to offer an amendment with Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), the House Republican Conference Chairwoman, that would “require the administration provide Congress information about any bounty program and Russia’s involvement in it,” reports The Hill.
Meanwhile, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is simply shrugging off the current accusations against Moscow as “nothing new.”
In the Times, Sanger and Schmitt point to what they call recent “Russian aggressions” that “rivals some of the worst days of the Cold war” — including cyberattacks on Americans working from home; continued concern over Russia trying to manipulate the November election; Russian jets testing U.S. air defenses off Alaska.
Plus, of course, “bounties” the Taliban reportedly got for killing American soldiers.
“Yet missing from all this is a strategy for pushing back — old-fashioned deterrence, to pluck a phrase from the depths of the Cold War — that could be employed from Afghanistan to Ukraine, from the deserts of Libya to the vulnerable voter registration rolls in battleground states,” Sanger and Schmitt write.
