USA TODAY International Edition
Tillerson had to condense foreign policy for Trump
WASHINGTON – Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told a House committee that he had to condense foreignpolicy issues for an inattentive President Donald Trump and faced repeated diplomatic end-runs by Jared Kushner, Trump’s adviser and son-in-law.
According to a newly released transcript of the closed-door interview in May, Tillerson told the House Foreign Affairs Committee that Trump’s refusal to read briefing papers and policy documents prompted Tillerson to make short presentations and try to focus on one point in his meetings with the president.
“It caused me to have to get very, very focused on, you know, what’s the most important thing I want him to remember about this discussion,” Tillerson told the committee. “And so sometimes I would use material that I would put in front of him, or other times, I just tried to be very concise with the points I wanted to make.”
Tillerson spoke to the committee’s staff May 21; USA TODAY received an embargoed copy of the transcript. The interview lasted about six hours and covered a wide range of topics – from Trump’s first meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2017 to Kushner’s freelance diplomacy.
A White House spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
When news emerged that Tillerson had met with the panel, Trump lashed out at his former secretary of state, calling him “dumb as a rock.” Trump fired Tillerson, the former CEO of ExxonMobil, in 2018 after a rocky relationship that included public disputes over North Korea and other issues.
NBC News reported that Tillerson called Trump a “moron” – something he declined to address in the House Foreign Affairs Committee interview.
Tillerson defended the decision to allow Trump to meet at length with Putin on July 7, 2017, when the two leaders were in Germany for a broader summit of world leaders, and to limit other participants. Besides Trump and Putin, only Tillerson, Russia’s foreign minister and two interpreters attended the session.
“It’s the way the Russians preferred it,” he told the committee staff. “It was supposed to be a courtesy meeting, and we decided we were okay with that.”
The meeting ended up lasting more than two hours, and Tillerson said Putin was well-prepared, Trump less so. Putin engaged in a detailed discussion of items on a “list of irritants” that Tillerson and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov had drawn up – items that had caused friction between the two countries and that they hoped to address to improve relations.
Tillerson said the list was mostly classified, but he disclosed one thing: Russia wanted to regain control of two diplomatic compounds the Obama administration had seized in New York and Maryland, in response to the Kremlin’s interference in the 2016 presidential campaign.
“President Putin had obviously come very prepared to talk” about items on the list, Tillerson said. “We didn’t undertake that kind of preparation for the president because we didn’t expect that.”
Tillerson said he did not see Trump take away the interpreter’s notes, as The Washington Post reported.