SCRUTINY ON THE BOUNTY
Trump hit for ‘I know nothing’ claim of Russian bid to kill G.I.s
Congressional Democrats left a classified briefing at the White House on Tuesday confident that President Trump was less than truthful when he brushed aside allegations about a Russian plot to kill American soldiers as a political “hoax.”
In fact, the Democrats, led by House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, said the closeddoor briefing only made them more alarmed about the allegations that a Russian military intelligence unit offered cash bounties for Taliban fighters to assassinate U.S. service members in Afghanistan.
“The president called this a hoax publicly. Nothing in the briefing that we have just received led me to believe it is a hoax,” Hoyer (D-Md.) said at a news conference on Capitol Hill. “There may be different judgments as to the level of credibility, but there was no assertion that the information we had was a hoax.”
Unable to delve into detail due to classification protocols, Hoyer and the other Democrats who attended the briefing said the White House did little to answer their myriad questions about the Russian bounty scandal and what Trump knew about it.
“The right people to give the briefing really were not in the room,” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) said, lamenting that Trump political appointees led the briefing instead of career intelligence officials.
Hoyer chimed in: “I thought this briefing was the White House personnel telling us their perspective. I think we knew the White House perspective. What we need to know is the intelligence perspective.”
The Democratic briefing came one day after the White House hosted Republicans for a similar update on the unsettling bounty allegations.
Hoyer said he repeatedly pressed White House aides for assurances that the full Congress will be briefed. The aides refused to give any such commitments, Hoyer said.
On Sunday, Trump called the bounty plot allegations “possibly another fabricated Russia hoax” after The New York Times first reported that he had been briefed on the intelligence months ago but did nothing to push back on the Kremlin.
Trump and his officials have maintained that the president was never briefed on the intelligence.
Meanwhile, an FDNY firefighter killed alongside two of his fellow Marines in Afghanistan reportedly may have been the victim of the bounties operation. Christopher Slutman, a father of three and a Marine reservist assigned to Ladder 27 in the Bronx, was killed by a car bomb near the Bagram Air Base in April 2019.
The mother of Robert Hendriks, a Marine corporal also killed in that attack, has called for an investigation into whether the Taliban fighters who killed her son targeted him for Russian money.
“The parties who are responsible should be held accountable, if that’s even possible,” Felicia Arcuelo, who lives on Long Island, told CNBC Monday.
On Tuesday afternoon, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany insisted that Trump’s “the most informed person on planet Earth when it comes to the threats that we face” and claimed he wasn’t looped in on the Russian bounty intel because it hasn’t been corroborated.
She also took sharp aim at the “rogue intelligence officers” who leaked the information to the press.