Former Secretary of State John Kerry condemned President Trump’s assertion Monday that he was not convinced that Russia meddled in the 2016 election, calling it “indefensible.”
“I’ve been involved in public life for six decades,” Kerry said in a statement Monday evening. “I have never seen an American president do or say anything remotely like what President Trump did today. No one else has, either, and everyone knows it. It is more than unfortunate; it is indefensible.”
Kerry said that “the issue isn’t having a meeting with an adversary,” but claimed that Trump has “surrendered lock, stock and barrel to President Putin’s deceptions about the attacks on America’s democracy.”
At a joint press conference Monday with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Trump openly expressed doubt about whether Russia intervened in the 2016 U.S. election, noting that Putin told him the Russian government was not at fault, even though the U.S. intelligence community concluded in a January 2017 assessment that Russia was behind the meddling operation. Trump also defended himself and claimed that there was “no collusion” between his campaign with the Kremlin.
“This is insanity. The president said he didn’t ‘see any reason why’ Russia would interfere in our elections,” Kerry said. “Today’s appalling display is exactly why Russia would have chosen to intervene.”
Kerry also accused Trump of agreeing with “Putin over our intelligence community.”
“The problem isn’t Trump having a summit; it’s Trump having a policy that’s bad for America, bad for our allies, and only good for Vladimir Putin. ‘All I can do is ask the question,’ said the holder of the office known as the leader of the free world. The job of an American president is to do much more than ask questions. This is a disgraceful moment. The president’s party knows better. I know they do. I served with many of them. America needs them to speak out with clarity and conviction not just in this news cycle, but until there’s common sense governing America’s foreign policy. No one should let this news cycle pass and just go back to business as usual.”
[More: ‘Shameful’: Senate Republicans blast Trump after he blamed US for soured Russian relationship]
— John Kerry (@JohnKerry) July 16, 2018
The meeting between Trump and Putin came days after Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein announced that special counsel Robert Mueller, who is leading the ongoing Russia probe on Russian interference in the 2016 election, indicted 12 Russian officials on charges of engaging “in a sustained effort” to break into computers owned by Democrats in the lead-up to the 2016 election.
