Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Trump: Russia not sole election meddler
President says other nations were possibly involved
President says he thinks “a lot of people interfered.”
WARSAW, Poland — On the eve of his first face-toface meeting as president with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump on Thursday declined to hold the Kremlin solely responsible for meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, insisting that others may have interfered as well.
Trump’s remarks during a visit to Poland, hours before arriving in Germany for a two-day summit of the Group of 20 world leaders, seemed to answer in the negative the main question hanging over his highly anticipated session with Putin: Would he chastise the Russian president in person for what the U.S. intelligence community has said was a complex spy operation designed to undermine the U.S. elections and help Trump win?
Breaking with the norms of presidential foreign visits, Trump in his comments strongly criticized his predecessor President Barack Obama by name, as he stood alongside the Polish president for a news conference.
In a separate speech before Poles crowding Warsaw’s historic Krasinski Square, Trump did signal areas where he might confront the Russian autocrat. He chided Russia for “destabilizing activities” in Ukraine and signaled a U.S. intent to step up energy supplies to Eastern Europe, as an alternative to Russian sources that Moscow occasionally has manipulated to “coerce” weaker neighbors, as Trump put it. In an implicit rebuke, he invited Russia to join “the community of responsible nations” in fighting extremism.
Trump, at the news conference, also said he was considering some unspecified “pretty severe things” in response to North Korea’s firing of a ballistic missile that could possibly hit Alaska. “Something will have to be done about it,” he said.
Trump’s joint news conference with President Andrzej Duda, a right-wing populist who has cracked down on immigration, the judiciary and the news media in Poland, reflected both men’s adversarial relationship with reporters. In front of his foreign audience, Trump repeated attacks on “fake news,” and CNN and NBC in particular, turning to a smirking Duda at one point to ask jokingly, “Do you have that problem?”
His characterization of Russian election interference was somewhat flip, in contrast with the near-certitude of U.S. intelligence assessments that the Kremlin directed a concerted campaign of cyber meddling meant to help Trump beat his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton. ”Nobody really knows for sure,” Trump said.
“I think it was Russia, and it could have been other people in other countries,” he said. “I think a lot of people interfered.”
Even while leaving conditional the degree of interference by Moscow — “if Russia did it,” as he put it — Trump also renewed an attack against Obama, falsely saying he had failed to act when intelligence officials informed him of Russian interference months before the election. Among other things, Obama privately confronted Putin and in December imposed sanctions on Russia and expelled 35 Russian officials from the United States.
Trump also compared the apparent certainty of intelligence agencies about Russian meddling to assessments more than a decade earlier that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
“They were wrong and it led to a mess,” he said.
Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee, said Trump continued to “directly undermine” U.S. interests.
“This is not putting America first, but continuing to propagate his own personal fiction at the country’s expense,” Schiff said in a statement. “President Trump must have the courage to raise the issue of Russian interference in our elections directly with President Putin, otherwise the Kremlin will conclude he is too weak to stand up to them.”
At the news conference and in his speech, Trump did pledge to work with European allies “in response to Russia’s actions and destabilizing behavior” in Eastern Europe. In the speech before supportive Poles, Trump offered an explicit commitment to NATO’s founding principle of common defense, which he had failed to endorse unambiguously at a May meeting of the alliance members in Brussels.
But Trump did so only in the context of reiterating his criticism of the NATO allies for not contributing enough financially.