President-elect Trump’s son, Donald, attended a meeting in Paris hosted by a Russian-aligned think tank that discussed ways to cooperate with Russia in resolving the Syria crisis, according to a report.
“This event featured a number of opinion leaders from all over the world who were interested in the U.S. elections,” Trump senior adviser Kellyanne Conway told the Wall Street Journal, which first reported on the October event.
The meeting was hardly a secret, although its location perhaps delayed its recognition by American media. The Center of Political and Foreign Affairs featured a photo of Donald Trump Jr. on its website — along with an image of James Rubin, a foreign policy adviser to Hillary Clinton, who also met with think tank founder Fabien Baussart in October.
“I succeeded to pass Trump, through the talks with his son, the idea of how we can cooperate together to reach the agreement between Russia and the United States on Syria,” Randa Kassis, Baussart’s wife, wrote in a Facebook post that accompanied a story on Trump’s victory published by Sputnik News, which is a Kremlin-controlled outlet. The EU Parliament branded Sputnik a tool of “hostile propaganda” in a draft resolution on Wednesday.
“Ms. Kassis, who was born in Syria, is a leader of a Syrian opposition group endorsed by the Kremlin. The group wants a political transition in Syria — but in cooperation with President Bashar al-Assad, Moscow’s close ally,” the WSJ explained.
Trump’s stated willingness to cooperate with Russian President Vladimir Putin, paired with his apparent disregard for Russia’s annexation of Crimea and comments about not defending NATO countries that fail to spend enough money on defense, has alarmed Eastern European governments and American foreign policy hawks.
The junior Trump’s participation in the roundtable could be another sign of how Trump hopes to rely on his children as he governs; he has already suggested son-in-law Jared Kushner will play a role in the Middle East peace process. But Trump is also considering appointing Mitt Romney to lead the State Department, despite Romney’s campaign trail criticism of the real estate mogul and calls for a muscular policy regarding Putin.
“This is without question our No. 1 geopolitical foe,” Romney said of Russia in 2012. “They fight for every cause for the world’s worst actors.”
