Trump says he would welcome foreign help to smear opponents
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump, after two years of hammering home a simple, powerful defense — “no collusion!” — came under bipartisan fire Thursday after he said he would gladly “listen” if a foreign government offered him dirt on a political opponent, and asserted there would be nothing wrong with doing so.
The president’s defiant comments in a television interview suggest special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s final report — which found “sweeping and systematic” Russian interference in the 2016 election aimed at helping Trump win — did not so much chasten Trump as embolden him.
National security veterans warned that Trump’s cavalier attitude all but invited foreign meddling in the 2020 race, raising the stakes as election officials and campaigns worry about sophisticated “deepfake” videos and other disinformation aimed at influencing voters.
“Every hostile intelligence service in the world is listening to that,” said Robert Anderson, a former assistant director of the FBI’s counterintelligence division. “Forget Russia, it’s everybody. It’s China, it’s Iran.”
The president’s stated willingness to accept foreign help in an election set off a cascade of criticism Thursday, spurring fresh Democratic calls for impeachment and some Republican expressions of concern, if not condemnation. Under federal law, foreigners are barred from donating money or making gifts to influence U.S. elections.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, said Trump’s comments “show he does not know the difference between right and wrong, and that’s probably the nicest thing I could say about him.”
Pelosi said the House would introduce legislation to require campaigns to report foreign offers of assistance. But she said she still isn’t ready to call for an impeachment proceeding, reflecting a political calculation that public support is lacking and broader recognition that Trump has shifted public attitudes about acceptable behavior in the Oval Office.
Although Mueller concluded that Trump’s campaign welcomed Russian offers of help in 2016, he did not charge anyone for doing so.
Trump subsequently embraced Mueller’s 448-page report as a blanket approval for his behavior, which included publicly urging Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails in July 2016. Russian intelligence operatives tried to do just that hours later, according to Mueller’s report.
Trump has ignored or defied traditional ethical guidelines and political norms since he launched his insurgent presidential campaign in 2015. His latest gambit simply shows how little he has changed as he plans to officially kick off his reelection bid next Tuesday at a rally in Florida.
Trump “still thinks of himself as a private billionaire who can act in office the way he did before,” said Timothy Naftali, a presidential historian at New York University.
“The only bright line is what you can get away with,” said Gwenda Blair, a Trump biographer who traces Trump’s winner-take-all approach to his family’s business background doing bareknuckle real estate deals in New York.
“Trump operates in a very narrow and entirely amoral universe,” said Tony Schwartz, ghostwriter of Trump’s breakthrough book, “The Art of the Deal.” “Right is what he believes serves him best. Wrong is anything and anyone who gets in his way. Legality and truthfulness never enter the equation.”
That disdain for outside scrutiny has filtered through the Trump administration, and historians and legal scholars worry it could make a long-term dent in democratic institutions.
The latest evidence came Thursday when the Office of Special Counsel, an independent federal agency not connected to Mueller, said one of Trump’s most visible advisers, Kellyanne Conway, should be removed from office for repeatedly violating the Hatch Act, a federal law that bars politicizing the White House.
The office wrote that Conway’s repeated disparaging of Democratic presidential candidates in her official capacity “erode the principal foundation of our democratic system — the rule of law.”
Rather than acknowledge a problem, Trump’s spokesman called the Office of Special Counsel’s recommendation a violation of Conway’s free speech and blamed “media pressure and liberal organizations” for pressuring the federal agency to target her for practicing standard politics.
That defense echoes Trump’s controversial interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos that aired Wednesday night.
Trump likened election help from a foreign government to his own campaign’s opposition research on rival candidates.