Trump’s comments about foreign election assists fire up Dems
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 Mueller’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-calif., 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 448page 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 president also said his own FBI director, Christopher A. Wray, was “wrong” when he warned that a candidate should immediately notify the FBI if offered foreign support.
“The FBI doesn’t have enough agents to take care of it,” Trump said. “When you go and talk, honestly, to congressmen, they all do it, they always have, and that’s the way it is. It’s
called oppo research.”
As his interview dominated news coverage Thursday, Trump tried to reframe his comments in a series of dissembling tweets.
“I meet and talk to ‘foreign governments’ every day. I just met with the Queen of England, the Prince of Whales, the P.M. of the United Kingdom, the P.M. of Ireland, the President of France and the President of Poland. We talked about ‘Everything!’” he tweeted. He later deleted that and reposted the remark spelling “Wales” correctly.
“Should I immediately call the FBI about these calls and meetings? How ridiculous! I would never be trusted again. With that being said, my full answer is rarely played by the Fake News
Media. They purposely leave out the part that matters,” he added.
ABC subsequently published the interview transcript in full, undercutting the president’s claim that his comment was clipped or edited.
Republicans, as they often have when backed into a corner by Trump, attempted to distance themselves from his comments while also defending him.
Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who normally is quick to defend Trump, said “it should be practice for all public officials who are contacted by a foreign government with an offer of assistance to their campaign — either directly or indirectly — to inform the FBI and reject the offer.”