The White House’s attempts to undo the damage President Trump did Monday during his joint press conference in Helsinki with Russian President Vladimir Putin may make things worse.
Dishonesty tends to do that.
The White House knows the president screwed up on Monday when he cast doubt on an assessment shared by the U.S. intelligence community and the U.S. Senate that Moscow interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The White House also knows the president screwed up when he suggested he trusts the Russian KGB as much as (if not more than) the American CIA.
It makes sense, then, that the president’s Twitter account would tweet this later Monday evening, “As I said today and many times before, ‘I have GREAT confidence in MY intelligence people.’ However, I also recognize that in order to build a brighter future, we cannot exclusively focus on the past – as the world’s two largest nuclear powers, we must get along!”
[More: Trump’s own intelligence chief distances himself from Russian meddling comments]
The problem here with the White House’s Helsinki damage control is that it’s comically bad. It’s pure revisionism, plain and simple. The president clearly threw his own people under the bus, siding with Putin’s authoritarian regime against the U.S. No amount of restating or clarifying will undo that.
Let’s look at the president’s own words.
The Associated Press’ Jonathan Lemire first said, “President Putin denied having anything to do with election interference in 2016. Every U.S. intelligence agency concluded Russia did.” (This bit about “every U.S. intelligence” is incorrect. Only three of the 17 agencies included have come to that conclusion.)
“[W]ho do you believe?” Lemire continued. “[W]ould you now, with the whole world watching, tell President Putin, would you denounce what happened in 2016 and would you warn him to never do it again?
Trump responded: “[M]y people came to me, [Director of National Intelligence] Dan Coats came to me and some others. They said they think it’s Russia. I have President Putin, he just said it’s not Russia. I will say this. I don’t see any reason why it would be, but I really do want to see the server.”
By “server,” Trump means the Democratic National Committee server that was hacked by Russian operatives.
Trump added, “But I have — I have confidence in both parties. I really believe that this will probably go on for a while, but I don’t think it can go on without finding out what happened to the server. What happened to the servers of the Pakistani gentleman that worked on the DNC? Where are those servers? They are missing. Where are they, what happened to Hillary Clinton’s emails — 33,000 emails gone, just gone.”
“I have great confidence in my intelligence people. But I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today,” Trump said. “What he did is an incredible offer. He offered to have the people working on the case come and work with their investigators with respect to the 12 people. I think that’s an incredible offer.”
If this is how Trump talks about agencies in which he has “GREAT confidence,” I’d love to hear how he talks about the ones in which he has none.
