Republicans and Democrats are at odds over the Trump administration’s decision Monday to hold off on new sanctions that target Russia’s intelligence and defense sectors.
Lawmakers included the Russia sanctions in a bill signed reluctantly by President Donald Trump in August. The measures were meant in part to punish the Kremlin over 2016 election interference—but top Democratic lawmakers said the administration’s move to delay implementing some of the penalties failed to do that.
“The Trump administration had a decision to make whether they would follow the law and crack down on those responsible for attacking American democracy,” said Eliot Engel, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs committee. “They chose instead to let Russia off the hook yet again.”
The State Department told reporters ahead of a Monday deadline that foreign governments have abandoned billions of dollars worth of Russian defense acquisitions since the enactment of the bill. If the legislation is already “serving as a deterrent,” then specific sanctions “will not need to be imposed,” a spokesperson said.
Ben Cardin, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told reporters Tuesday that the administration’s reluctance to impose sanctions against the Kremlin under the bill is “disappointing.”
“If there was significant reductions, that was one thing,” Cardin said, referring to the administration’s claim that the legislation is deterring defense deals with Russia. “But it does not appear that it’s aggressive enough. I understand they say, ‘This is day one.’ I’ve heard that. What’s day two going to look like, and what is Russia going to do in the meantime?”
Republicans had a different take. Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Bob Corker, who is sometimes a critic of the president’s, told reporters Tuesday morning that the sanctions decision has “a lot of misinformation” surrounding it.
“There was a period of time for the diplomats, the State Department and others, to make sure that people knew if they did business with Russia they were going to be penalized,” Corker said. “There were a lot of arms sales that didn’t happen because of this legislation.”
The Tennessee senator said now that that time period has ended, the administration “will begin to … put sanctions in place” against those that didn’t heed their earlier warning.
The State Department said Monday that “foreign governments and private sector entities have been put on notice … that significant transactions with listed Russian entities will result in sanctions.” The sanctions target those that do significant business with Russian defense and intelligence firms.
Corker’s House counterpart, Chairman Ed Royce, had a similar reaction to the sanctions decision.
“Powerful new sanctions on the Russian intelligence and defense sectors are now live,” he said in a statement. “These measures are already succeeding in squashing business with bad actors. If and when future violations occur, I expect the administration to act swiftly.”
A House aide told TWS that while the law created a “new rule on the books,” it did not mandate the designations themselves.
“Democrats are upset that a foul wasn’t called in the first minute of the game,” the aide said, comparing the situation to basketball. “But the administration is saying, ‘look, the fact that we have this new rule has already modified the behavior of some of the players here. We’ll call a foul as soon as we see it.’”
A sanctions expert told reporters Tuesday that while the sanctions are mandatory, their imposition is “based upon a determination that significant transaction has occurred.”
“It’s effectively retrospective,” said Brian O’Toole, a former Treasury Department official and senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. “A deal has to have happened, and then you have to sanction the entities involved.”
Daniel Fried, who served as sanctions policy coordinator at the State Department under President Barack Obama, said the administration was “clumsy” in communicating the sanctions decision, including the diplomacy that likely went into it. But he said that he sympathized with the underlying sentiment.
“That was a bad way of making a valid point,” he said. “The administration ought to have given itself some credit.”
“If in fact the State Department had been, over the past few months, using the existence of that provision to discourage Russian arms sales, then it was acting to advance the purpose of the law,” he told reporters. “If they had success, then … it certainly is reasonable to avoid actually dropping the hammer through the use of sanctions.”
Democrats’ anxiety over the sanctions move stems not just from their suspicions of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin, but from earlier delays by the administration to implement a requirement related to the same set of sanctions. Administration officials in October delayed providing lawmakers with guidance on Russian defense and intelligence-linked entities that could face sanctions.
