White House, Congress mull response to election meddling
President Trump says his administration will “move aggressively to repel any efforts” to interfere in the upcoming midterm elections.
Trump said the White House is doing “everything in our power to prevent Russian interference in 2018.”
The president told reporters he accepts the American intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia interfered in the 2016 election. But he is continuing to deny that his campaign colluded in the effort.
The president spoke a day after he returned from his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. Trump has faced an avalanche of criticism from Democrats and Republicans alike for declining to condemn Russia’s interference in the 2016 election or declining to say he believes U.S. intelligence agencies instead of Russia’s denials of interference.
The No. 2 Senate Republican also said yesterday there may be additional sanctions on Russia in the upheaval following Trump’s summit with Putin.
U.S. Sen. John Cornyn of Texas told reporters that sanctions might draw bipartisan support because Democrats have also backed the idea. “We could find common ground to turn the screws on Russia,” Cornyn said.
Cornyn suggested sanctions legislation as an alternative to plans for a resolution supporting the intelligence community’s findings that Russia interfered in the 2016 election.
A resolution — as some in the House are suggesting — is “just some messaging exercise,” Cornyn said.
No votes are scheduled yet as lawmakers consider various ways to respond after Trump, at the summit, suggested he believed the Russian president’s denials of election interference, rather than the findings of the U.S. intelligence agencies.
The moves come after a rare correction by the president over his embrace of Putin by saying he saw no reason to believe Russia had interfered in the 2016 U.S. election.
Trump said yesterday: “The sentence should have been, ‘I don’t see any reason why I wouldn’t,’ or ‘why it wouldn’t be Russia’ instead of ‘why it would,’ ” he said of the comments he had made standing alongside Putin on Monday’s summit stage in Helsinki.
He didn’t reverse other statements in which he gave clear credence to Putin’s “extremely strong and powerful” denial of Russian involvement, raised doubts about his own intelligence agencies’ conclusions and advanced discredited conspiracy theories about election meddling.
While Trump was in damage control, the Russian president came home to universal praise.
Instead of being portrayed as a duel on the world stage, the summit was viewed in Russia as a meeting of two mighty men who discussed global problems — and then had to face down a crowd of pesky journalists.
Back in Moscow, Russian authorities quickly jumped to act on Putin’s overtures.
The Russian military offered yesterday to boost military cooperation with the U.S. in Syria after Putin claimed the two leaders found common ground in solutions for a postwar Syria.