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Musicmystery -> RE: President Trump, Melting Under Criticism (7/11/2017 4:33:08 AM)
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‘Time to Move Forward’ on Russia, Trump Says, as Criticism Intensifies
“You are hurting your ability to govern this nation by forgiving and forgetting and empowering,” Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said of Mr. Trump, calling his meeting with Mr. Putin “disastrous.”
“The more he talks about this in terms of not being sure, the more he throws our intelligence communities under the bus, the more he’s willing to forgive and forget Putin, the more suspicion,” Mr. Graham added in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “And I think it’s going to dog his presidency until he breaks this cycle.”
As if to underscore the point, the White House confronted reports later Sunday that Donald Trump Jr., Mr. Trump’s eldest son, was promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton before agreeing to meet with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer at Trump Tower during the campaign last year. The accounts of the meeting, by three White House advisers briefed on it and two others with knowledge of it, represent the first public indication that at least some people in Mr. Trump’s campaign were willing to accept Russian help.
Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff, had played down that meeting during an appearance on “Fox News Sunday,” calling it a “nothing meeting,” and a “big nothing burger.”
President Trump’s account of his lengthy and closely scrutinized closed-door meeting with Mr. Putin on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit meeting came in a series of Twitter posts the morning after he had returned from the gathering in Hamburg, Germany. They appeared to be an attempt to move beyond the controversy after Moscow characterized the election discussion as a meeting of minds rather than a showdown between the American president and his Russian counterpart.
Administration officials knew that Mr. Trump’s much-anticipated meeting with Mr. Putin was risky and in some ways a no-win situation. The tangle of investigations into his campaign’s possible dealings with Russia raised the stakes and created a damaging backdrop for Mr. Trump, while Mr. Putin’s well-earned reputation for outfoxing and manipulating adversaries suggested that he would stage manage the meeting for maximum advantage, making himself appear to have the upper hand.
On Sunday, it appeared that Mr. Putin had to some degree succeeded in doing just that, after Mr. Trump’s refusal to answer questions about the encounter essentially ceded the narrative to Mr. Putin.
Mr. Trump broke with tradition and declined to hold a news conference at the end of the G-20 summit meeting, instead sending three top officials to brief a small group of reporters on Air Force One as he was returning on Saturday to Washington. None of them would address the claims of Mr. Putin and Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, that Mr. Trump had seemed satisfied with Mr. Putin’s denial of involvement in the hacking.
Mr. Trump’s tweets on Sunday did little to dispel the notion that he had backed down on the election meddling issue. He characterized his position as an “opinion” and asserted that he was prepared to team with Moscow — which United States intelligence agencies say carried out a large-scale effort to interfere with American democracy last year, and will try to again — on forming an “impenetrable Cyber Security unit” to thwart future breaches.
“I strongly pressed President Putin twice about Russian meddling in our election,” Mr. Trump said in one post. “He vehemently denied it. I’ve already given my opinion.”
Mr. Trump’s highlighting of the potential cybersecurity initiative with Moscow — which he backed away from hours later in a tweet that said it would never happen — prompted derision from Republicans and Democrats who said Russia was the last country the United States should trust on such matters.
“I am sure that Vladimir Putin could be of enormous assistance in that effort, since he’s doing the hacking,” Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona and the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California and the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, called the idea “dangerously naïve.”
“I don’t think we can expect the Russians to be any kind of a credible partner in some cybersecurity unit,” he said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “If that’s our best election defense, we might as well just mail our ballot boxes to Moscow.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/09/us/politics/time-to-move-forward-trump-says-after-putin-denies-election-hacking.html
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