Thread: Examining Politics Podcast: Former ambassador says Putin loves Trump, probably hacked

Examining Politics Podcast: Former ambassador says Putin loves Trump, probably hacked Dems

By David M. Drucker (@DavidMDrucker) • 8/18/16 6:00 AM



Former ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul said in an interview that he is convinced the Russian government is behind the hacking of Democratic Party political organizations.

In an interview this week with the Washington Examiner's "Examining Politics" podcast, McFaul said that Russian strongman Vladimir Putin's affection for Republican nominee Donald Trump as a fellow nationalist could be a motivating factor for the hacking. He declined to speculate on WikiLeaks' motivation for releasing the hacked material or how the rogue group might have received it.

"I think [Putin] prefers to work with Trump as president. Mr. Trump shares a lot of foreign policy views that the Kremlin and Mr. Putin espouse and so I just think he thinks it would be easier to work with Trump than" former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, with "whom he had some rather big disagreements about foreign policy," McFaul said.

On the eve of the Democratic convention in Philadelphia in July, Wikileaks publicized hacked documents from the Democratic National Committee, and have since done the same with hacked documents from other Democratic Party committees.

McFaul is pretty convinced Moscow behind the hacking in part because they are one of the few countries capable of pulling it off. But also, McFaul said, "Our intelligence community has said with high confidence — that's as high as they get, those two words — this was the Russians."

As a member of President Obama's National Security Council staff before being promoted to ambassador, McFaul, a fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution, was an architect of the policy known as the "Russian reset."

That policy has dogged Clinton on the campaign trail because Russia's growing beligerance suggests the policy was misguided and failed. Looking back, McFaul's views are mixed. He doesn't believe criticism of Clinton is fair.

"I think the reset was a great success for as long as it lasted, and that's a crucial distinction," McFaul said. In hindsight, he said, the U.S. should have adjusted once it was clear that conditions on the ground had changed.

"Two things happened, Putin came back, and there were demonstrations on the street in Russia, and he became paranoid and needed America to become the enemy again," McFaul said. "And that's when the reset ended."

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/ex...rticle/2599620

Oh McFaul is an idiot, no wonder relations are so poor with Russia when we have idiots like this running their mouths as former Ambassadors.