HENRICO, Va. — Democrat Abigail Spanberger said in an interview Wednesday that President Trump’s extraordinary Helsinki news conference would reverberate in her bid to oust Republican Rep. Dave Brat.
Spanberger, a former clandestine officer with the Central Intelligence Agency, said she was still processing Trump’s joint appearance with Russian President Vladimir Putin. She suspects that voters in Virginia’s Republican-leaning 7th Congressional District are doing the same. Foreign policy has crept into the contest before, only to recede in favor of kitchen table issues: healthcare, education, and jobs.
“This one might be different, because it’s so fundamentally shocking,” Spanberger said, during an interview from her campaign’s headquarters in the Richmond suburbs. “I do anticipate that this will continue to be a longer conversation because it also has now brought to the forefront an actual national security threat, which has existed but wasn’t necessarily present on people’s radar.”
Russian interference in the 2016 elections, and the threat of meddling in the midterm elections and beyond, is a major worry of the U.S. intelligence community and national security experts. The topic is a big deal in Washington, but as Spanberger noted, much less so on the campaign trail — not just in her contest, but also in congressional races across the country.
Trump’s comments standing side by side with Putin, which Spanberger said made her feel as though “I literally almost had this choking reaction” and left her “incredulous,” could make the issue of Russian meddling, and the federal investigation into the matter, center stage in the midterm elections. That is exactly what Republicans fear.
“I think certainly in our race, between Dave Brat and me, I’m only one recognizing this as an actual threat to our national security and identifying that we really need to make sure that Congress is leading on and making sure the president understands the depth of the threat posed here,” Spanberger said.
Republican strategists working to preserve the GOP’s precious House majority have labeled Brat one of the party’s most vulnerable incumbents. Brat appears to have belatedly recognized the danger he’s in. He offered only a mild rebuke of Trump’s remarks, attempting to shift attention to former President Barack Obama, on whose watch Moscow’s intrusion occurred.
“The United States should stand unequivocally opposed to a foreign government meddling in our elections in any form or fashion,” Brat said in a Twitter post. “Unfortunately, for eight years the Obama administration operated as if Russia was not a major geopolitical threat. Their foreign policy failures emboldened Putin to take aggressive actions around the world and set the stage for where we are today.”
Trump on Monday capped bilateral talks and a working lunch with Putin with a joint news conference, during which he drew a moral equivalence between the actions of Moscow and Washington on the world stage, heaping heavy blame for the rift in U.S.-Russia relations on his won country.
Trump then sided against the U.S. intelligence, and with a defiant Putin, on the issue of Russian interference in 2016, suggesting he trusted the Russian strongman and didn’t know why it “would” be Russia. The president later attempted to walk back those comments, saying he meant to say he blamed Russia and trusted U.S. intelligence.
In a subsequent interview with CBS News, Trump went further, saying that he agrees with U.S. intelligence and holds Putin responsible: “I let him know that we can’t have this and we’re not going to have it and that’s the way it’s going to be.”
