US senators to grill Pompeo over Trump-Putin summit, N.Korea
WASHINGTON: Did Donald Trump make secret promises to Vladimir Putin? What did the American president tell his Russian counterpart at their Helsinki summit?
US senators, distressed by the Republican billionaire’s recent behavior, will demand answers from his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo Wednesday, when he provides the most closely watched congressional testimony of his young tenure as the nation’s top diplomat.
Lawmakers have been eager for Pompeo to report back about a previous critical summit June 12 in Singapore between Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.
Their demand became all the more urgent after Helsinki, in particular the joint press conference during which Trump was seen by Republican and Democratic lawmakers alike as betraying American interests and being too conciliatory towards Putin.
“The Helsinki press conference was a sad day for our country, and everyone knows it,” Senator Bob Corker, the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and an occasional Trump critic, told reporters Tuesday.
Russia will therefore be the primary focus of Pompeo’s 3pm (1900 GMT) appearance before the committee.
But Corker made it clear his panel will also grill Pompeo about his recent trip to Pyongyang, Trump’s ‘ undermining’ of Nato and the alliance’s principal of mutual defence, and the president’s controversial tariffs which appear to be mushrooming into a trade war.
“I will testify about a lot of things including the relationship between the United States and Russia” and the ‘incredibly important’ Trump-Putin summit, Pompeo said.
The closed- door meeting was panned by US lawmakers and observers, but Pompeo insisted it was “one I think the world will have benefited from when history is written.”
More Trump- Putin history may be made in the coming months.
The White House has announced that Putin has been invited to Washington for another meeting later this year, even as Pompeo lamented that Congress was unimpressed with Trump’s unprecedented determination to push back against Russia’s “malign behaviour around the world.” — AFP