A top congressional Republican has advised President-elect Trump to stop cozying up to Russian strongman Vladimir Putin.
Rep. Devin Nunes of California, the House Intelligence Committee chairman, told the Washington Examiner in an interview that he fears Trump is making the same mistake as his predecessors in believing that he can charm Putin and shift Russia’s behavior from that of U.S. adversary to international partner.
President George W. Bush said after his initial dealings with Putin that he had looked into his soul and believed him to be trustworthy. Their relationship, and U.S.-Russia relations eventually broke down. President Obama tried his hand at rapprochement with Moscow, initiated the “Russian reset” under the direction of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton upon assuming office in 2009. That effort also ended in failure, after some early successes.
“And now you have President-elect Trump who believes he can do the same thing,” Nunes said this week, in an episode of the Examiner’s “Examining Politics” podcast that will air on Thursday. “My advice to them has been, that, you know, many good people have tried. We’d like to see it happen, we’ll see if President-elect Trump has any luck, but put me in the pessimistic category. I just think it’s going to be tough to get anything done with Putin, but he’ll try.”
Trump has been unusually complimentary of Putin and the Russian government for an American leader — especially for a Republican. He has downplayed the Russian president’s anti-democratic actions domestically and on the world stage and described the quasi-dictator’s leadership in glowing terms.
But Nunes said that the media is being unfairly critical of Trump’s approach to Putin, and is conveniently omitting that it is not much different than the tack Obama and Bush took early in their presidencies.
“A lot of this is the epitome of fake news. I don’t see what Donald Trump is doing as any different than what Obama did or what George W. Bush did, as we were just discussing. I just don’t see any difference whatsoever,” Nunes said. “Those of us that didn’t trust Putin and would say things that were maybe disparaging, that was a problem to the administration. The administrations would always say, whether it was Bush or Clinton — Clinton, Bush or Obama — they would just say: ‘Oh, can’t say anything bad, got to work with the Russians … Well, that’s the same thing Donald Trump’s essentially saying.”
