“The president is going to meet with his team and we’ll let you know when we have an announcement on that.” Those are the words of White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders in answer to a question at Wednesday’s White House press briefing. The question was about Vladimir Putin’s suggestion in Helsinki that the U.S. and Russia exchange interrogation subjects: We would interview the Russians indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller for election interference, and the Russians would interview the American-born British businessman Bill Browder and former ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul.
The Kremlin entertains a bizarre vendetta against a number of Americans, Browder and McFaul chief among them—Browder because he is primarily responsible for getting Congress to sanction Russia after its government wrongly imprisoned Browder’s friend Sergei Magnitsky and probably tortured him to death; McFaul because the Kremlin believes he encouraged anti-Putin sentiment during his ambassadorship from 2012 to 2014. But of course that the U.S. government would facilitate the Kremlin gaining access to these two men is almost unbelievable.
Almost unbelievable.
As for Sanders’s vague response to the question about Browder and McFaul, it should be said that every White House press secretary, and in fact every politician or political spokesman, sometimes answers specific questions vaguely for the purpose of preserving options or buying time. But surely Sanders knew that the U.S. government would never subject innocent American citizens to the hostile interrogation of a foreign power; that indeed the government has no power to do any such thing. Surely, too, she understood that to subject an American diplomat to the aggressions of the government to which he was a diplomat is to turn the ancient principle of diplomatic immunity on its head—meaning that any government anywhere in the world can simply arrest or imprison American diplomats on any charges at all.
Surely she knew these things, yet she answered vaguely—presumably because her boss had already called Putin’s proposal an “incredible offer” and (we suspect) told her to say that the administration was considering the idea. And so when she was again pressed on the question, her answer was noncommittal: “He said it was an interesting idea. He didn’t commit to anything. He wants to work with his team and determine if there’s any validity that would be helpful to the process. But again, we’ve committed to nothing. And it was an idea that they threw out.”
President Trump often floats ideas in order to gauge the media’s and public’s response before committing to it. When the response is overwhelmingly negative, as it was in this instance, he often backs off and pretends he never entertained the notion. So it happened this time. The diplomatic community rightly protested—State Department spokesman Heather Nauert openly rejected the whole idea—and by Thursday afternoon the Senate passed a resolution by a vote of 98-0 expressing its opposition to any policy of subjecting American officials to the interrogations of foreign governments. Hence on Thursday, during the build-up to the Senate vote, Sanders announced that the White House now opposed it, too. “It is a proposal that was made in sincerity by President Putin, but President Trump disagrees with it.”
And, finally, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo went on Fox News on Thursday night to definitively reject the idea that the administration would allow Russia to interview U.S. officials.
We remain baffled why the administration took three days to clarify its position on a proposal that should have needed neither thought nor time to reject. It’s hard to believe that Trump even cared about obtaining access for Mueller to the indicted Russians. Why take the idea seriously, then, or pretend to take the idea seriously? Our horror at the president’s performance this week has reached its limit, so we will try to assume that nobody in the administration seriously considered apprehending American citizens for the purpose of subjecting them to interrogation by Kremlin prosecutors. We choose to believe, likewise, that the president really didn’t “meet with his team” to discuss defenestrating diplomatic immunity for the purpose of earning favor with Vladimir Putin.
We are perhaps wrong in these assumptions, but let us persist in them until this dreadful week has passed.
