Rep. Will Hurd (R-TX), a former CIA officer, said on Twitter that President Trump was “getting played” by Russian president Vladimir Putin.
Said Hurd: “I’ve seen Russian intelligence manipulate many people over my professional career and I never would have thought that the US President would become one of the ones getting played by old KGB hands.”
Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) told BuzzFeed News that “something close” to the long-rumored “pee tape” exists, saying he thinks “it’s likely” that Vladimir Putin has something on President Trump.
David Frum: “We still do not know what hold Vladimir Putin has upon President Trump, but the whole world has now witnessed the power of its grip.”
“Russia helped Donald Trump into the presidency, as Robert Mueller’s indictment vividly details. Putin, in his own voice, has confirmed that he wanted Trump elected. Standing alongside his benefactor, Trump denounced the special counsel investigating the Russian intervention in the U.S. election—and even repudiated his own intelligence appointees.”
“This is an unprecedented situation, but not an uncontemplated one. At the 1787 convention in Philadelphia, the authors of the Constitution worried a great deal about foreign potentates corrupting the American presidency.”
“A Russian woman who tried to broker a pair of secret meetings between candidate Donald Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin during the 2016 presidential campaign, was charged Monday and accused of carrying out a secret Russian effort to influence American politics,” the New York Times reports.
“The Justice Department said in court documents that the woman, Mariia Butina, worked to establish ‘back channel’ lines of communication with American politicians… Ms. Butina twice tried to set up a meetings between Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin in 2016. The charges announced Monday do not name Mr. Trump but they make clear that Ms. Butina’s overtures were part of a Russian intelligence operation.”
The Washington Post notes that Butina is accused of developing relationships with American politicians and a “gun rights organization.”
Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) issued a statement:
Today’s press conference in Helsinki was one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory. The damage inflicted by President Trump’s naiveté, egotism, false equivalence, and sympathy for autocrats is difficult to calculate. But it is clear that the summit in Helsinki was a tragic mistake.
President Trump proved not only unable, but unwilling to stand up to Putin. He and Putin seemed to be speaking from the same script as the president made a conscious choice to defend a tyrant against the fair questions of a free press, and to grant Putin an uncontested platform to spew propaganda and lies to the world.
It is tempting to describe the press conference as a pathetic rout – as an illustration of the perils of under-preparation and inexperience. But these were not the errant tweets of a novice politician. These were the deliberate choices of a president who seems determined to realize his delusions of a warm relationship with Putin’s regime without any regard for the true nature of his rule, his violent disregard for the sovereignty of his neighbors, his complicity in the slaughter of the Syrian people, his violation of international treaties, and his assault on democratic institutions throughout the world.
Coming close on the heels of President Trump’s bombastic and erratic conduct towards our closest friends and allies in Brussels and Britain, today’s press conference marks a recent low point in the history of the American Presidency. That the president was attended in Helsinki by a team of competent and patriotic advisors makes his blunders and capitulations all the more painful and inexplicable.
No prior president has ever abased himself more abjectly before a tyrant. Not only did President Trump fail to speak the truth about an adversary; but speaking for America to the world, our president failed to defend all that makes us who we are—a republic of free people dedicated to the cause of liberty at home and abroad. American presidents must be the champions of that cause if it is to succeed. Americans are waiting and hoping for President Trump to embrace that sacred responsibility. One can only hope they are not waiting totally in vain.
James Fallows: “Either Donald Trump is flat-out an agent of Russian interests—witting, unwitting, from fear of blackmail, in hope of future deals, out of manly respect for Vladimir Putin, out of gratitude for Russia’s help during the election, out of pathetic inability to see beyond his 306 electoral votes—whatever the exact mixture of motives might be, it doesn’t really matter.”
“Or he is so profoundly ignorant, insecure, and narcissistic not to realize that, at every step, he was advancing the line that Putin hoped he would advance, and the line that the American intelligence, defense, and law-enforcement agencies most dreaded.”
“Conscious tool. Useful idiot. Those are the choices, though both possibly true—the main question is the proportions.”
Playbook: “Yes, of course some will, but not most. Why? Myriad reasons, and it’s not really that neat and easy to assign one motivation to hundreds of Republicans. But Trump can truly do no wrong with a large segment of the Republican base. So, in a political system where a primary challenge is your principal political hurdle, you don’t want to be on the wrong side of the popular president. Many, though, will seethe privately, for whatever that’s worth.”
“Donald Trump’s press conference performance in Helsinki rises to and exceeds the threshold of ‘high crimes and 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???”
— Former CIA Director John Brennan, on Twitter.
“Yes, I did, yes I did, because he talked about bringing U.S.-Russia relations back to normal.”
— Russian President Vladimir Putin, at his press conference with President Trump, on whether he wanted Trump to win the 2016 presidential election.
In an interview with Popula — Anthony Bourdain’s last before he committed suicide — the celebrity chef slammed former president Bill Clinton.
Said Bourdain: “Bill Clinton, look, the bimbo eruptions—it was fucking monstrous. That would not have flown today. A piece of shit. Entitled, rapey, gropey, grabby, disgusting, and the way that he—and she—destroyed these women and the way that everyone went along, and, and are blind to this! Screamingly apparent hypocrisy and venality.”
He added: “He is a very charming man, I met him, he’s fucking magnetic… As is she. When you’re in the room, you think wow, she’s really warm and nice and funny. But the way they efficiently dismantled, destroyed, and shamelessly discredited these women for speaking their truth.… is unforgivable.”
Foreign policy analyst Ian Bremmer tells CBS News that backstage at the NATO meeting there were elements that were even more eyebrow-raising than reports have suggested.
Said Bremmer: “Trump was very frustrated; he wasn’t getting commitments from other leaders to spend more. Many of them said, ‘Well, we have to ask our parliaments. We have a process; we can’t just tell you we’re going to spend more, we have a legal process.’ Trump turns around to the Turkish president, Recep Erdogan, and says, ‘Except for Erdogan over here. He does things the right way,’ and then actually fist-bumps the Turkish president.”
“It was a startling gesture of support for the increasingly authoritarian Turkish leader, who recently won another term and is widely expected to continue consolidating his power.”
A U.S. official gives CNN three reasons why President Trump wanted a one-on-one meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin:
President Trump described his one-on-one meeting with Russia’s Vladimir Putin as a “good start,” Reuters reports.
“Trump made the brief remarks in front of reporters, at a conference table surrounded by top officials at the start of a ‘working lunch’ that began after he and Putin met behind closed doors for two hours with only their interpreters.”
“Democrats are centering their campaign to retake Congress and defeat President Trump’s Supreme Court pick on a staunch defense of the Affordable Care Act, the landmark health-care law that Republicans used to wipe away their majorities in the last two midterm elections,” the Washington Post reports.
“The strategy marks a dramatic turnabout from the previous two midterms when many Democrats avoided defending Obamacare, and illustrates the extent to which the law has taken root as millions of Americans have come to depend on it. Republicans, who relentlessly attacked Democrats for supporting the ACA in 2010 and 2014, are now largely steering their campaigns toward different topics.”
David Ignatius: “Putin’s elite spy world has been penetrated by U.S. intelligence. That’s the implication of the extraordinarily detailed 29-page indictment of 12 Russian military intelligence (GRU) officers handed up by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigators on Friday. The 11-count charge includes names, dates, unit assignments, the GRU’s use of ‘X-agent’ malware, its bitcoin covert funding schemes and a wealth of other tradecraft.”
“Putin must be asking himself: How did the Americans find out all these facts? What other operations have been compromised? And how much else do they know?”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.