The news agencies in the US are in over-drive. All of Trump's critics are out in fully force, first - blaming Trump with going ahead with this Summit with Putin (because of Mueller's indictment of 12 Russian's "in suppose hacking" of the election) to criticizing Trump for playing into Putin's hands?
Here's a sampling of articles from the Bloomsburg News agency and some highlights:
July 16, 2018 - Trump Calls One-on-One With Putin ‘Good Start’ After 2-Hour Talk
Trump Calls Mueller Probe ‘Disaster’ While Standing Next to Putin
President Donald Trump said a two-hour, one-on-one meeting with Vladimir Putin was a “good start” on Monday for their Helsinki summit, but gave no indication he had relented to increased pressure to confront the Kremlin leader over election meddling.
The highly anticipated event was running behind schedule after the leaders extended their solo session, at which only their respective translators were in attendance. For Putin, the meeting is a win even before it began, as it helps restore an image of parity with the U.S. that Russia lost after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Before bringing aides in to join them in the meeting, Trump said the summit was off to “a very good start for everybody.” Earlier, as the summit opened, Trump said their discussions would cover “everything from trade to military to missiles to nuclear to China.”
He didn’t mention a U.S. grand jury’s indictments of 12 Russian intelligence agents on Friday or the Kremlin’s interference in the 2016 U.S. election.
In a bit of gamesmanship, Putin arrived in Helsinki about a half-hour late, while Trump didn’t depart the resort home where he was meeting with advisers for the summit until after the Russian leader arrived at the presidential palace. The meeting was delayed about an hour as a result.
“It is now time to talk in depth about our bilateral ties and sore points in the world,” Putin said in Russian. “There are enough of those that we need to pay attention to.”
Having campaigned on a promise to improve ties with Putin, Trump met the Kremlin leader over the objections of U.S. lawmakers after the grand jury’s indictments of the intelligence agents for their alleged role in meddling with the 2016 election. The Russian agents are accused of hacking email accounts controlled by the
Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign and publicizing messages. The indictments raised the stakes for the Helsinki summit, even as aides to both Trump and Putin ratcheted down expectations.
“Our relationship with Russia has NEVER been worse thanks to many years of U.S. foolishness and stupidity and now, the Rigged Witch Hunt!” Trump
wrote on Twitter as he prepared to meet Finland’s president, Sauli Niinisto, for breakfast.
The Russian Foreign Ministry responded by tweet: “We agree.”
The Putin meeting follows a contentious NATO summit in Brussels last week at which Trump badgered U.S. allies to more rapidly increase their defense spending, insinuating he might withdraw from the alliance otherwise. He continued to castigate U.S. allies during his visit to the U.K., where he involved himself in the internal affairs of British Prime Minister Theresa May and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Spoiling The Mood - Trump deflected responsibility for confronting Moscow, saying in tweets and interviews that former President Barack Obama had done nothing to prevent the hacks of Democratic email accounts or to punish the Russians afterward.
The Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Friday that the indictments were baseless and had been timed to poison the mood ahead of the summit. Putin has allowed that non-state actors in Russia -- people he likened to “artists” -- may have taken it upon themselves to launch cyberattacks on Clinton’s campaign and the DNC.
“This is an attempt to see if we can defuse and take some of the drama, and quite frankly some of the danger, out of the relationship,” Jon Huntsman, the U.S. ambassador to Russia, said Sunday.
One possible outcome of the summit is renegotiation of a nuclear treaty that expires in 2021. Putin may update Trump on negotiations for pro-Iranian militias in Syria to withdraw from areas near Israel in favor of government troops.
The Russian leader meanwhile wants to discuss the U.S. seizure of Russian diplomatic properties in the U.S. as punishment for the 2016 election meddling, as well as the arrests of Russian citizens in third countries at Washington’s request.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Saturday on RT that the aim of the meeting is merely to open what he called “frozen” channels of communication. Russia was kicked out of the Group of Eight nations after its 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine. Relations have further degraded over Putin’s support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in his country’s civil war, and a nerve-agent poisoning this year of a former Russian spy living in Britain that the U.K. government has pinned on Moscow.
<
Trump Calls Mueller Probe ‘Disaster’ While Standing Next to Putin> By
Justin Sink,
Margaret TalevIlya, Arkhipov,
Jennifer Jacobs
President Donald Trump called Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian election meddling a “disaster” on Monday, again questioned whether Russia interfered in the 2016 election that he won and suggested he equally trusted U.S. intelligence officials and Vladimir Putin -- all as he stood beside the Russian leader.
In a remarkable news conference following a summit between Trump and Putin in Helsinki, both leaders challenged the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion that the Kremlin meddled in the election and criticized the investigation into the interference, led by Mueller, that has resulted in indictments against more than two dozen Russians. The comments provoked a rare on-the-record rebuttal from Trump’s own intelligence director.
Putin said he wanted Trump to win the 2016 election but again denied his government had done anything to help the then-candidate.
In effect, the American and Russian presidents together aligned themselves against the U.S. intelligence and law enforcement establishment. There was swift and bipartisan condemnation of Trump in response, while Russian government officials and analysts delighted in the spectacle.
“The probe is a disaster for our country,” Trump said of Mueller’s investigation after he was asked whether he holds Russia accountable at all for poor relations with the U.S. “It’s kept us apart. It’s kept us separated.”
Trump said that “my people” including Dan Coats, his intelligence director “came to me and some others, they said they think it’s Russia.”
“I have President Putin, he just said it’s not Russia. I will say this, I don’t see any reason why it would be,” he continued. “I have confidence in both parties.”
Coats fired back with a statement later in the day, saying the intelligence findings are “fact-based” and “We have been clear in our assessments of Russian meddling in the 2016 election and their ongoing, pervasive efforts to undermine our democracy.”
Swift Rebuke - Democrats and some Republican members of Congress who have been critical of Trump in the past rebuked the president.
Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican, said Trump’s press conference “was one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory.” He added that “the damage inflicted by President Trump’s naiveté, egotism, false equivalence, and sympathy for autocrats is difficult to calculate.”
Republican Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska blasted Trump’s statement blaming both sides for problems in the U.S.-Russia relationship as “bizarre and flat-out wrong.”
Senator Jeff Flake, an Arizona Republican, said on Twitter, “I never thought I would see the day when our American President would stand on the stage with the Russian President and place blame on the United States for Russian aggression. This is shameful.”
John Brennan, who was CIA director under President Barack Obama and helped produce the intelligence reports that first found Russia meddled in the election, called Trump’s statements at the press conference “nothing short of treasonous.” He added that Trump “is wholly in the pocket of Putin.”
Reaction from several Trump advisers varied. Some were aghast, predicting political fallout back home and that the backlash over the news conference would push the White House’s preferred narrative -- the strength of the economy; Trump’s Supreme Court nomination -- out of the news.
Others insisted Trump’s remarks were unsurprising, in-line with previous statements about Mueller’s probe -- he frequently criticizes it as a “witch hunt” -- and that the president wouldn’t be able to improve relations with Russia had he shamed Putin at the news conference.
<Republicans Call Trump Summit Remarks ‘Shameful’ and ‘Bizarre’> By
Steven T. Dennis and
Billy House
A growing number of Republican lawmakers harshly criticized President
Donald Trump’s performance at a Monday news conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin, with House Speaker Paul Ryan saying that Russia must be held accountable for meddling in the 2016 election.
Trump’s strongest GOP critics were those who have faulted the president in the past. A handful of Republicans defended the president’s remarks, made after the two leaders met in Helsinki.
Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican, said Trump’s comments represented “one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory” and that “no prior president has ever abased himself more abjectly before a tyrant.”
“The damage inflicted by President Trump’s naivete, egotism, false equivalence, and sympathy for autocrats is difficult to calculate,” McCain said in a statement. “But it is clear that the summit in Helsinki was a tragic mistake.”
<Putin Says He Agreed With Trump to Secure Syria Border With Israel> By
Henry Meyer
Russia has agreed with the U.S. to secure Israel’s Golan Heights frontier with Syria, a line set in 1974 at the end of their last war, Russian President Vladimir Putin said.
Russia has agreed with the U.S. to secure Israel’s Golan Heights frontier with Syria, a line set in 1974 at the end of their last war, Russian President Vladimir Putin said.
“This will allow us to return calm to the Golan, restore the cease-fire between Syria and Israel and fully guarantee the security of the State of Israel,” Putin said at a news conference with U.S. President Donald Trump after their summit in Helsinki on Monday. “Mr. President devoted a lot of attention to this. Russia wants this to happen.”
Trump said that “creating safety for Israel is something that both President Putin and myself” want to happen.
The U.S. has been pushing Russia to help eject Iran from postwar Syria, something the Kremlin says can’t be achieved. Still, the two countries have been trying to negotiate a deal on a pull back of Iranian-backed forces in southern Syria from the frontier and the deployment of troops loyal to the government in Damascus in their place. The Israeli-occupied section of the Golan was captured from Syria in the 1967 Middle East war.
Putin last week met separately in Moscow with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a senior envoy of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, in an effort to forge a compromise.
Civil War - Trump has shifted away from his predecessor Barack Obama’s policy of demanding the ouster of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, a position the U.S. adopted before Russia intervened militarily in late 2015 to turn the tide of the civil war in Assad’s favor with Iran’s help.
Still, there are major questions about Putin’s ability to enforce any agreement involving Iran’s actions in Syria, even if he offers to deploy troops to police the border areas in question. Russia has taken the lead with Iran and Turkey in seeking to enforce a halt to the civil war that began in 2011, so that United Nations-backed peace talks can try to reach a political settlement.
Netanyahu commends the “abiding commitment” of the U.S. and Trump to the security of Israel and Putin’s pledge to uphold the 1974 disengagement accord, his office said in a text message.
<Trump’s Tainted Helsinki Talks With Putin> By
Timothy L. O'Brien
By insulting allies and acting as a Kremlin apologist, the president has done nothing to assuage suspicion over his motives. When President Donald Trump meets with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki today he already will have given Russia’s leader a gift that eluded Putin’s predecessors throughout the Cold War’s long and perilous decades: bragging rights for having helped separate the U.S. from its Western European allies.
Trump — who began his recent European diplomatic tour by attacking Germany’s Chancellor, Angela Merkel, before repeatedly undermining and insulting the U.K.’s Prime Minister, Theresa May —
told CBS’s Jeff Glor over the weekend that he considered the European Union to be America’s “foe.” He described Russia and China as foes in the same interview, too, but that was something of an afterthought.
When asked to identify his “biggest foe globally right now,” his first response was the EU.
Trump, of course, has also gone out of his way to compliment and coddle Putin and his representatives in Washington ever since he launched his presidential bid in 2015. He has
rarely criticized Putin during that period, diplomatic and strategic courtesies he hasn’t extended to Merkel and May, for example. Trump’s long string of indulgences for Putin includes being an apologist for the Kremlin’s efforts to sabotage the 2016 presidential election in the U.S.
<Trump’s Helsinki Disgrace> By
Eli Lake
The president sees good nations on both sides of the U.S.-Russia relationship.
Beware Russians bearing gifts. Photographer: Chris McGrath/Getty Images Europe
Nearly a year after Donald Trump crippled his presidency by saying there was “
blame on both sides” after a scrum between white nationalists and anti-racist protesters in Virginia, he has created another Charlottesville moment. This time it was on the world stage.
Trump’s 40-minute press conference on Monday with Russian President Vladimir Putin was an exercise in nauseating moral equivalency. In Trump’s view, there are good nations on both sides.
Start with the most obvious example. When asked whether he would condemn Putin for interfering in the U.S. election, Trump launched into
a bizarre rant about the Democratic National Committee’s “missing server.” The president of the United States should know better, particularly after Robert Mueller’s
latest indictment, which detailed how a dozen Russian military intelligence agents hacked the email accounts of leading Democrats.
Then Trump went further. After Putin said he would allow U.S. law enforcement officials to come to Moscow and watch as his police question the 12 agents Mueller indicted, Trump responded by calling it “an incredible offer.”
It isn’t. Putin was falsely equating his own country’s information operation against the Democratic Party with the U.S.’s refusal to recognize an arrest warrant for William Browder, the chief executive of Hermitage Capital. Browder has spent the last nine years of his life pursuing justice for Sergei Magnitsky, his Russian lawyer, who died in prison in 2009 after exposing embezzlement by government officials.
And who knows what Trump said in private to Putin; they met alone (with only translators present) for two hours before meeting the press. But Trump’s failure to summon a micron of public outrage at Putin’s false equivalency is telling.
<Putin and Trump Couldn’t Make the Relationship Work> By
Leonid Bershidsky
The summit ended without agreements because there’s nothing the leaders can do for each other, however much they would like to.
Given the weeks of apocalyptic speculation that preceded the Helsinki summit between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, the news conference that followed the meeting Monday should have been anticlimactic: Nothing was agreed, nothing gained or conceded. And yet
John Brennan, who ran the Central Intelligence Agency during the Obama administration,
tweeted that Trump’s performance was “nothing short of treasonous.”
John O. Brennan ✔ @JohnBrennan
Donald Trump’s press conference performance in Helsinki rises to & exceeds the threshold of “high crimes & misdemeanors.” It was nothing short of treasonous. Not only were Trump’s comments imbecilic, he is wholly in the pocket of Putin. Republican Patriots: Where are you???
11:52 AM - Jul 16, 2018
<America First, Unless Vladimir Putin’s in the Room> By
Mark Gongloff
Trump’s Helsinki performance shows who’s really No. 1.
Body language.
That Helsinking Feeling! Photographer: ALEKSEY NIKOLSKYI/AFP/Getty Images
Many people expressed shock about President Donald Trump’s performance in a press conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin today. But maybe they should have seen it coming.
To be sure, it was pretty surprising that Trump didn’t at least wave in the general direction of the mountain of evidence Russia interfered in the 2016 election. Instead, he gave Putin a pass, said a bunch of confusing stuff about Hillary Clinton’s email server and called Robert Mueller’s investigation “a disaster.” Instead of criticizing Russia for its bad behavior, including naked aggression in Eastern Europe, he retreated to the
same “good people on both sides” argument he made in response to white-supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, last year, points out
Eli Lake.
This was the sort of thing Bloomberg LP founder Michael R. Bloomberg expressed worry about ahead of the Trump-Putin summit, which followed a contentious NATO meeting: “Alienating friends who share our values while ignoring a hostile power’s intrusions into U.S. sovereignty is diplomacy at its most incompetent and counterproductive … .” Click
here to read the whole thing.
And
Tim O’Brien had written that
Trump’s motives going into the summit were already suspect, given the many ties between his campaign and Russia and his long history of coddling Putin: “Whatever conversation Trump has with Putin today is going to be tainted regardless of talking points, alas, because Trump has established himself so firmly as a Putin fanboy.”
Some called Trump’s press-conference behavior
treasonous.
Leonid Bershidsky argues it’s “just sad:” Trump so desperately needs validation that he will even seek it from Vladimir Putin. And while Russia’s President is glad to give Trump warm fuzzies, the
relationship can never yield much more, with both sides now appearing hopelessly compromised.
On the plus side, as Eli and Leonid note, though he’d long ago given Putin his dignity, Trump at least gave away nothing concrete.
(Comment: With all this Trump bashing (with the above - as only a small sampling) the hate speech puts Trump in a more vulnerable position of an "attempted assassination" when he gets back on US soil? I pray for his safety - at this point!)
Thing is Special Counsel already said NO collusion, and an ‘indictment’ doesn’t mean anything until something is proved in a court of law, and uh hello? DNC servers? But not that it matters to these lunatics.
!