Thread: Putin’s Bet on a Trump Presidency Backfires Spectacularly

Putin’s Bet on a Trump Presidency Backfires Spectacularly

By DAVID E. SANGER
JULY 30, 2017

A little more than a year after the Russian effort to interfere in the American presidential election came to light, the diplomatic fallout — an unraveling of the relationship between Moscow and Washington on a scale not seen in decades — is taking its toll.

President Vladimir V. Putin bet that Donald J. Trump, who had spoken fondly of Russia and its authoritarian leader for years, would treat his nation as Mr. Putin has longed to have it treated by the West. That is, as the superpower it once was, or at least a major force to be reckoned with, from Syria to Europe, and boasting a military revived after two decades of neglect.

That bet has now backfired, spectacularly. If the sanctions overwhelmingly passed by Congress last week sent any message to Moscow, it was that Mr. Trump’s hands are now tied in dealing with Moscow, probably for years to come.

Just weeks after the two leaders spent hours in seemingly friendly conversation in Hamburg, Germany, the prospect of the kinds of deals Mr. Trump once mused about in interviews seem more distant than ever. Congress is not ready to forgive the annexation of Crimea, nor allow extensive reinvestment in Russian energy. The new sanctions were passed by a coalition of Democrats who blame Mr. Putin for contributing to Hillary Clinton’s defeat and Republicans fearful that their president misunderstands who he is dealing with in Moscow.

So with his decision to order that hundreds of American diplomats and Russians working for the American Embassy leave their posts, Mr. Putin, known as a great tactician but not a great strategist, has changed course again. For now, American officials and outside experts said on Sunday, he seems to believe his greater leverage lies in escalating the dispute, Cold War-style, rather than subtly trying to manipulate events with a mix of subterfuge, cyberattacks and information warfare.

But it is unclear how much the announcement will affect day-to-day relations. While the Russian news media said 755 diplomats would be barred from working, and presumably expelled, there do not appear to be anything close to 755 American diplomats working in Russia.

That figure almost certainly includes Russian nationals working at the embassy, usually in nonsensitive jobs. (A 2013 State Department inspector general’s report, the last concrete numbers publicly available, said there were 934 “locally employed” staff members at the Moscow Embassy and three consulates, out of 1,279 total staff members. That would leave roughly 345 Americans, many of whom report regular harassment by Russian officials.) And of course there are many nondiplomats working for the United States government in Russia at any given time — experts from departments across the government, from energy to agriculture, and a large station of spies, some working under diplomatic cover.

“One of Putin’s greatest goals is to assure Russia is treated as if it was still the Soviet Union, a nuclear power that has to be respected and feared,” said Angela Stent, the director of Eurasian, Russian and East European studies at Georgetown University. “And he thought he might get that from Trump,” said Ms. Stent, who was the national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia during the administration of George W. Bush.

But now, she added, the Russians look at the chaos in the White House “and see a level of unpredictability there, which makes them nervous.” The reaction, she said, was to retreat to old habits — and the expulsion of diplomats is, of course, one of the oldest.

Those in the administration who served during the Cold War are also returning to that terminology. Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, told a security conference in Aspen, Colo., this month that he had no doubt that the Russians “are trying to undermine Western democracy.” His boss has never uttered a similar phrase.

A senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity on what has become one of the most sensitive diplomatic problems facing the Trump administration, said the White House had not given up hopes for a better relationship. Mr. Putin’s interview on Russian television, in which he announced the reduction in staff, was free of bombast, the official noted. Russia seems uncertain about the direction of the relationship, leaving open the possibility of a reversal.

“The Russians would have preferred not to head down this path, but Putin didn’t feel he had a choice but to respond in the classic tit-for-tat manner,” said Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, who has served in a number of senior intelligence roles for the United States, including in Russia. “We’ve been in a new Cold War for some time now. Any hope for a short-term improvement in relations is gone.”

That downturn accelerated in the last days of the Obama administration, he argued, “when emotions took over the relationship.” Now, said Mr. Mowatt-Larssen, who recently became director of intelligence and defense projects at the Belfer Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School, “fear has replaced anger in dealing with Russia.”

Sergey V. Lavrov, the savvy Russian foreign minister, has struck a measured tone in his conversations with Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson. In public, he has blamed not Mr. Trump, or the investigation into the Russian influence operation around the election, but Congress. “The latest developments have demonstrated that the U.S. policy turns out to be in the hands of Russophobic forces that are pushing Washington toward confrontation,” the Foreign Ministry said on Friday, after the passage of the latest sanctions act.

Forty-eight hours later, Mr. Putin announced the huge reduction in diplomatic staffing. He said the order would take effect Sept. 1. That leaves time for haggling.

But the fundamental issue will not go away by then. Mr. Putin has now concluded that his central objective — getting relief from the American and European sanctions that followed the annexation of Crimea in 2014 — is years away. Once new sanctions are enshrined in law, like the ones Congress passed and Mr. Trump has reluctantly agreed to sign to avoid an override of his veto, they generally stay on the books for years.

Moreover, Washington is awash in warnings that the attacks on the election system last year are just a beginning. “They are just about their own advantage,” James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director, told the Senate Intelligence Committee just before he was fired by Mr. Trump. “And they will be back.”

James R. Clapper Jr., the former director of national intelligence and a veteran of the Cold War, echoed that thought recently and mixed in more than a few issues that sounded straight out of the 1980s nuclear competition. “What we don’t mention very often is the very aggressive modernization program they’re embarked on with their strategic nuclear capability,” he said.

And that, in the end, is the real risk. With the exception of Syria — where the militaries of both nations have had sporadic, if mutually suspicious, contact — there is virtually no military-to-military conversation of the kind that took place routinely during the Cold War. And with Russian and American forces both operating near the Baltics, and off the coast of Europe, the chances for accident and miscalculation are high.

This latest plunge in relations comes at the 70th anniversary of “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” an article George Kennan, the architect of Cold War strategy, published in Foreign Affairs in July 1947 under the pseudonym “X.”

It defined the strategy that dominated Washington for the next four decades, captured in Mr. Kennan’s line that the “United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.”

That was not the approach Mr. Trump had in mind a year ago. It may now be the approach forced upon him.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/30/u...tacularly.html

Have the actually found the Russians tried to influence the election - for Pres. Trump, that is?

Have they found evidence they did anything more than they usually do?

Have they found evidence Russia did more than other countries, like Israel, who routinely get involved in our elections?

Have we talked about our involvement in other countries elections?

As for the expelled Americans in Russia - I would have done that a long time ago. How many of them are probably CIA?

One of the reasons given for the new sanctions is the interference in the elections. Are we going to put sanctions on any country that does that?


This just makes no sense.

Wouldn't it be nice if we decided we investigate 'all' interference and illegality in our elections.

The president of Mexico once made a speech in Texas and said he wanted to talk to 'his people in North America'. He told them an election was coming up in the US and they should be sure to vote and 'Vote with Mexico in mind."

Absolutely right, nntrixie. Time to treat Russia with more diplomacy and respect, seems to me.

Donald Trump

Trump personally crafted son's misleading account of Russia meeting – report

Trump reportedly dictated statement on Air Force One on return from G20
Revelations draw president closer into tangled web over June 2016 meeting

In the release, the Russia meeting at Trump Tower was framed as a discussion principally about the adoption of Russian children Photograph: Joshua Roberts/Reuters

Ed Pilkington in New York

Tuesday 1 August 2017 02.25 EDTFirst published on Monday 31 July 201721.52 EDT

Donald Trump personally dictated the press statement issued in the name of his eldest son Donald Jr that misleadingly downplayed the significance of a 2016 meeting with a Kremlin-linked Russian lawyer, a new report alleged on Monday night.
nald Trump’s unfitnes
According to the Washington Post, Trump personally intervened to prevent senior White House advisers from issuing a full and truthful account of the meeting on 9 June 2016 in which Donald Trump Jr, the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, and then presidential campaign manager Paul Manafort came face-to-face with four Russians. One of the Russian visitors was the well-connected lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya.

The report, based on multiple though largely anonymous sources that included the president’s own advisers, has the potential to cause political, and even legal, trouble for the White House because it draws Trump himself much closer into the fray over the Trump Tower meeting, which has become a lightning rod in the Russian affair.

Shunning the guidance of lawyers and overturning the view apparently reached by Kushner and his team of advisers that a full and frank accounting should be made, Trump reportedly dictated a statement on board Air Force One as he was flying back to Washington from the G20 summit in Germany. As would soon become apparent, it gave a very partial and distorted account of events.

Donald Trump Jr and the Russia connectionIn the release the 2016 meeting was presented, in Trump’s own words, as “a short introductory meeting” dominated by discussion of the adoption of Russian children that was “not a campaign issue at the time”.

That statement was presented to the New York Times on 8 July, and duly included in the newspaper’s first account of the meeting. But within 24 hours, highly damaging revelations had emerged that made clear the meeting had been much more charged than that.

On 9 July, the Times revealed that Trump Jr had been lured into talking to Veselnitskaya by the promise of negative intelligence on his father’s presidential rival, Hillary Clinton, and two days after that the email chain waspublished that showed the younger Trump reveling in the idea of receiving dirt on the Democratic presidential candidate, uttering the gleeful phrase: “I love it”.

The Trump Tower meeting has proved to be one of the most toxic pieces of information to emerge so far in the billowing investigation into possible ties between Trump associates and Russia in the Kremlin’s efforts to skew the presidential outcome in favor of the Republican nominee. The special counsel leading the investigation, Robert Mueller, is understood to be looking closely at the event and has reportedly asked the White House to preserve all documents relating to it.

Until now, the president managed to keep some distance from the 9 June encounter, with his lawyers claiming that he knew nothing about it. But the new report that Trump personally oversaw the issuing of a misleading account of the proceedings raises questions about the president’s role in what could be conceived as a cover-up.

It comes as Mueller has already expanded his inquiry to include the issue of whether Trump was engaging in a possible obstruction of justice when he fired James Comey, having tried and failed to persuade the then director of the FBI to back off investigating former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s contacts with Russian officials.

A lawyer for the president issued the Washington Post with a curt statement: “Apart from being of no consequence, the characterizations are misinformed, inaccurate, and not pertinent,” Jay Sekulow said.

The new details of the president’s role in what turned out to be a major communications fiasco come on the day that his current communications chief, Anthony Scaramucci, was dismissed from the White House after barely 11 days. The blunt removal was made on the first day of the new White House chief of staff, John Kelly, who has vowed to introduce the kind of discipline that the West Wing has been sorely lacking.

The day began shortly before 5.30am with Trump tweeting “No WH chaos!” and ended with him saying: “A great day at the White House”. But as the Washington Post’s forensic deconstruction of the framing of the Trump Tower meeting shows, the president himself has the capacity to destroy even the best-laid plans, underlining the task now facing his new chief of staff.

According to the Post, senior White House officials together with the circle around Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, had spent days rehearsing various ways to address the Trump Tower meeting publicly.

Kushner’s team was reported to have decided that it was better to “err on the side of transparency” because the whole truth would eventually come out
.
Trump, however, appeared to have seen things differently.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jul/31/trump-statement-donald-trump-jr-russia-meeting

Jared Kushner tells interns: We couldn’t collude with each other, let alone Russia

Mr Kushner's off-the-record remarks were leaked to the media CREDIT: REUTERS/JONATHAN ERNST

Nick Allen, washington
Our Foreign Staff
1 AUGUST 2017 • 7:31PM

White House senior advisor Jared Kushner's was heard discussing the Middle East peace process and admitting there may be "no solution".

Mr Kushner's remarks to a group of interns in Washington were recorded and leaked to the media.

White House senior adviser Jared Kushner said the team couldn't have colluded with Russia because the team was too dysfunctional CREDIT: AP PHOTO/J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE

Mr Kushner, who is President Donald Trump's son-in-law, also told a group of congressional interns that the Trump campaign couldn't have colluded with Russia because the team was too dysfunctional and disorganised to coordinate with a foreign government.

The remarks on Monday came in response to a question about Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russia's meddling in the 2016 election and whether the Trump campaign worked with Moscow.

ForeignPolicy.com first reported Mr Kushner's remarks, which were intended to be off the record. "They thought we colluded, but we couldn't even collude with our local offices," he said, according to the website.

A Democratic congressional aide knowledgeable of the meeting confirmed the accuracy of the remarks and others that Mr Kushner made. The aide spoke on condition of anonymity.
ushner speaks out after Senate hearing on Russia

00:30

Mr Kushner also told the interns that the White House doesn't know where Mr Mueller's inquiry is headed.

He said he didn't think he'd embark on a career in government and politics after Trump's victorious White House bid so he didn't carefully track his contacts with foreign officials, which is required information on a security clearance application.

His meeting with the interns is part of a regular series in which guest speakers meet with them each year.

The organizers of the event initially asked the interns to write down their questions and Mr Kushner would randomly select them to answer.

But the congressional aide said Mr Kushner insisted on taking live questions and didn't hesitate to answer them.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017...-alone-russia/