Special counsel Robert Mueller indicted 13 Russians on Friday for their efforts to interfere with the U.S. political process. In the days since, President Donald Trump has taken to Twitter, pushing back hard on suggestions that his campaign colluded with the Kremlin, denying that he said Russia “did not meddle” in the 2016 election, and slamming the Obama administration for doing “nothing” about meddling ahead of the election.
I have been much tougher on Russia than Obama, just look at the facts. Total Fake News!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 20, 2018
Amid the ceaseless feuding between the president’s tweets and television chyrons, it’s helpful to recall the Trump administration’s actual track record on Russia. Experts’ views on the following will differ, but here’s a rough scorecard:
The good:
*The administration has continued enforcing the 2012 Magnitsky Act.
“Putin’s single largest foreign policy priority is to stop the Magnitsky Act,” Bill Browder, who led the push for the law’s passage, told TWS back in December. “The fact that it’s been done on schedule with real names on it is a very significant development.”
The law is named after Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer who died in a Moscow jail after uncovering a $230 million tax fraud scheme. Magnitsky worked as an auditor for Browder’s investment firm.
The administration has also enforced the first round of sanctions under the Global Magnitsky Act, a 2016 law that targets human rights abusers and corruption around the world.
“Global Magnitsky is a new bill. Only the Trump administration has had to administer it,” Daniel Fried, formerly the State Department’s sanctions policy coordinator, told TWS. “They did a good job and included a good choice for a Russian, that is, Prosecutor [Yury] Chaika’s son, who is deeply corrupt.”
Russia has lobbied against the Magnitsky Act—and in fact was the real reason Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya sought a meeting with Donald Trump Jr.
*The administration has maintained military deployments to NATO’s eastern front.
“The Trump administration has continued the Obama-era policies of NATO’s rotational deployments in the Baltics and Poland,” says Fried. “They may even do more if they increase the funding for the European defense initiative.”
*In a break with the Obama administration, the Trump administration agreed to supply Ukraine with lethal defensive aid in the years-long war on its eastern border. The State Department has also consistently criticized Russia for bolstering separatists in eastern Ukraine, for its 2014 annexation of Crimea, and for failing to implement the 2015 Minsk ceasefire agreement.
*The administration in August ordered that Russia close its consulate in San Francisco as well as annexes in Washington and New York.
Administration officials said the closures were “guided by parity” after Russia ordered the removal of 755 U.S. diplomatic staff. The Kremlin called for the staff cuts after both chambers of Congress passed a wide-ranging sanctions bill, which included penalties targeting Russia over its 2016 election interference.
*The administration ordered airstrikes in Syria after leader Bashar al-Assad, whom Moscow backs, waged another chemical attack against his own people in April.
“The Trump administration did go a step further by targeting [Bashar] Assad’s forces in retaliation for chemical attacks on civilians,” says Boris Zilberman, a Russia analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “While limited in nature, the attacks did cross a line the Obama administration was unwilling to.”
*They’ve increased sanctions on Russia related to Ukraine, which wasn’t always a certainty.
“We do not, and will not, accept Russian efforts to change the borders of territory of Ukraine,” Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said in March 2017. “The United States sanctions will remain until Moscow reverses the actions that triggered our sanctions.”
The Atlantic Council’s Fried says that in its early days, the Trump White House gave serious consideration to lifting Ukraine-related Russia sanctions. “For that near-miss disaster, they got slapped with CAATSA,” he says, referring to the wide-ranging sanctions bill that Trump begrudgingly signed in August. That legislation codifies Obama-era sanctions that were levied on Moscow through executive order.
Administration officials pushed back against certain provisions of CAATSA, especially those providing for congressional review of executive decisions. The law allows Congress to review any decision by the president to modify sanctions on the Kremlin.
“I would urge Congress to ensure any legislation allows the president to have the flexibility to adjust sanctions to meet the needs of what is always an evolving diplomatic situation,” Tillerson told lawmakers in June.
Fried told TWS that CAATSA is “a bit of a dog’s breakfast.” “Some of its provisions are good, some are unwise. It was drafted in haste,” he says. Even so, he says the administration has “not implemented any of them—not even the wiser ones.” (More on this below.)
The administration in May also reportedly weighed returning two Russian diplomatic compounds seized by then-President Barack Obama in late December over Moscow’s election interference. The Washington Post reported that Trump officials told the Kremlin in early May that they’d think about returning the compounds if Moscow lifted a 2014 freeze on the construction of a U.S. consulate in St. Petersburg.
The bad:
*The administration’s public response to 2016 election interference.
“While it’s possible that the U.S. has covertly responded to Russian cyber efforts, the publicly known administration responses have been limited,” says Megan Reiss, a national security fellow with the R Street Institute. “The administration itself has not implemented sanctions against bad cyber actors or publicly declared using our own cyber capabilities to stop bad actors.”
Lawmakers have slammed the administration for not acting on congressionally mandated Russia sanctions, especially those intended to punish Moscow for election interference.
“The administration has imposed no new sanctions required under the mandatory provisions in the Counteracting America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA), though the law was enacted six months ago,” a group of top Democrats wrote to Tillerson in late January. “This is unacceptable.”
Many of those lawmakers say the administration has delayed implementing portions of the bill, has not satisfactorily implemented other portions, and has not implemented other sections altogether.
Recent reports indicate that the Trump administration is well into a review of options for responding to Russian cyber activities. Per these reports, the administration is considering new sanctions related to the Kremlin’s 2016 election interference.
“The process on sanctions is long; it’s arduous; it’s not pretty, but when the evidence is there and we’re ready, we go ahead with the sanctions,” Reuters quoted one official as saying.
Even so—some also question the extent to which sanctions will be an adequate response to election interference.
“We have already sanctioned the Russians a lot over what they’ve done in Ukraine. It’s sort-of throwing more on the pile,” says Matt Rojansky, a Russia expert at the Wilson Center. “The marginal effect of additional sanctions at that point may not match the degree of Russia’s attack on us. That may not be very effective in terms of retaliation.”
*The president’s own wavering rhetoric on Russian meddling.
In the wake of Friday’s indictment, the president tweeted that he “never said Russia did not meddle in the election.”
I never said Russia did not meddle in the election, I said “it may be Russia, or China or another country or group, or it may be a 400 pound genius sitting in bed and playing with his computer.” The Russian “hoax” was that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia – it never did!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 18, 2018
But Trump has not consistently taken a strong stand against Russian meddling, which the intelligence community has concluded was approved at the highest levels of the Russian government. He has questioned that assessment, spoken of the meddling in terms of hypotheticals, and has, at least in public remarks, given Russian president Vladimir Putin the benefit of the doubt.
“Every time he sees me, he says, ‘I didn’t do that.’ And I believe—I really believe that when he tells me that, he means it,” Trump said in November. “I think that he is very, very strong in the fact that he didn’t do it.”
These sorts of statements from the president undercut his administration’s condemnations of malicious Russian cyber activity, says R Street’s Reiss.
“Public declarations from administration officials blaming Russia for its cyber efforts . . . are undermined by the repeated decisions of the president to avoid “naming and shaming” Russia for its cyber activities,” she says.
Rojansky suggested that the president’s reluctance to punish Russian interference is tied to a fear of undermining his election victory.
“He seems to believe . . . that if he were to react in terms of deterrence or retaliation, that those would effectively be acknowledgement of some interpretation of what Russia did that damages his credibility or legitimacy as president,” he says.
Trump has been plagued—and deeply peeved—by the variety of ongoing investigations into election interference, which involve any potential collusion between his campaign and the Kremlin.
*Letting Putin have a “PR victory” at the G20 summit.
Garry Kasparov reported on the July 7 meeting between Trump and Putin for THE WEEKLY STANDARD:
“The mere scheduling of this friendly chat handed Putin a PR victory, which the Kremlin-controlled media exploited gleefully. Not only was the Russian dictator not isolated or under pressure for invading Ukraine, enabling Bashar al-Assad’s genocide in Syria, and interfering in the U.S. presidential election, but the American president announced that it was an honor to meet with him.
Putin hardly needs encouragement to pursue further hostile acts. As fashionable as it may be to blame everything to do with Russia on Trump, the above-listed crimes all took place during the presidency of Barack Obama. Putin likely would not recognize deterrence if he saw it. Yet replacing Obama’s worthless red lines with Trump’s red carpet only fuels the Russian threat to the world order.”
