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GOP Lawmakers Used to Oppose Trump’s Embrace of Russia. No More.
High-ranking Republicans are now defending the president with debunked claims that national security experts say play right into Putin's hands.
Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) and Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC). Pushing Kremlin disinformation.
For reasons we don't yet understand, Donald Trump has embraced the brutal Putin regime since early in his 2016 election campaign. In their efforts to protect Trump from impeachment charges that he engaged in a political shakedown of Ukraine using US taxpayer funds as collateral, the GOP is resorting to defend Trump by borrowing Kremlin disinformation from Moscow's hybrid warfare against Ukraine. And after six months, GOP Senate Majority Leader "Moscow" Mitch McConnell has still not brought up the bipartisan DETER Act for a vote on the Senate floor.
High-ranking Republicans are now defending the president with debunked claims that national security experts say play right into Putin's hands.
Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) and Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC). Pushing Kremlin disinformation.
12/5/19
Just how far will Republicans go in following President Donald Trump’s embrace of Russia? An answer may be crystallizing as the GOP mobilizes its defense of the president against impeachment. Both congressional Republicans and conservative commentators are defending Trump from impeachment partly by accusing Ukraine of intervening against him in the 2016 presidential election—despite repeated warnings from national-security and intelligence officials that those claims are not only baseless, but advance Vladimir Putin’s goal of discrediting Ukraine. Earlier in Trump’s presidency, many Republicans sought to distance themselves from his warm tone toward Putin. But just this week alone, a number of Republican lawmakers, the official House Republican report rebutting impeachment, and the Fox News host Tucker Carlson have repeated Kremlin lines on Ukraine. This flurry of GOP rhetoric comes as Democrats are raising alarm about the Republican-controlled Senate’s refusal to take action on the DETER Act, a bipartisan bill that would impose sanctions on Russia if it interferes again in 2020. Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, the act’s sponsor, has been unsuccessfully pressing Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to attach the bill to a defense-authorization bill now in conference between the House and Senate, which would ensure its passage. “Nobody has provided any substantive justification for opposing this measure,” Van Hollen told me in an interview. “All the testimony has been supportive of the DETER Act. And yet when you get behind closed doors, it’s not that anyone says they are opposed to it; they just won’t engage. McConnell would like to see this defeated without any of his fingerprints on it, but his fingerprints are there because he has refused to engage.”
Impeachment is now providing a new test case to measure how far Trump has steered congressional Republicans toward greater accommodation of Russia. This new front opened when Representative Devin Nunes of California, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, repeatedly insisted during last month’s impeachment hearings that Ukraine had meddled in the 2016 election against Trump. That drew a stern rebuke from one witness asked to testify, the former Trump National Security Council adviser Fiona Hill, who warned that congressional Republicans were spreading “a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves.” But Hill’s words have not stopped Republicans from reprising those arguments. In late November, Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana claimed during a television interview that Ukraine, not Russia, might have hacked the Democratic National Committee’s computers in 2016. The Senate Intelligence Committee, during its investigation of 2016 election meddling, found no evidence of Ukrainian interference. Republican foreign-policy experts are still worried about the attempts by GOP leaders to defend Trump by disparaging Ukraine. “It’s one thing if Putin says these things, or if Kremlin spokespeople say these things; people, I hope, will take it with a gigantic mountain of salt. But when you have U.S. elected leaders saying these things, it gives it a significant dose of credibility, and that’s not a good thing.” The accusations against Ukraine have drawn forceful pushback this week from Democrats, but only a few Republicans—most directly Senator Mitt Romney of Utah—have openly condemned them. “What you are seeing unfortunately is Republicans wanting to just adopt and parrot the Trump talking points, which also coincide with the Putin talking points,” Van Hollen said.
For reasons we don't yet understand, Donald Trump has embraced the brutal Putin regime since early in his 2016 election campaign. In their efforts to protect Trump from impeachment charges that he engaged in a political shakedown of Ukraine using US taxpayer funds as collateral, the GOP is resorting to defend Trump by borrowing Kremlin disinformation from Moscow's hybrid warfare against Ukraine. And after six months, GOP Senate Majority Leader "Moscow" Mitch McConnell has still not brought up the bipartisan DETER Act for a vote on the Senate floor.