Last week, U.S. President Donald Trump stood next to Russian President Vladimir Putin and dismissed the threat of the Kremlin’s election meddling. Virtually every relevant interest agrees that in 2016, Russian interests sought to mold the outcome of the United States elections according to their own preferences.
Despite an attempt at a retraction, Trump’s repeated dismissals of election meddling hang heavy over the country. On Tuesday, U.S. Senators Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) and Chris Coons (D-Del.) introduced a resolution for a second time formalizing Congressional support for the Russian meddling investigation and calling for the Trump administration to ramp up their response. Also for a second time on Tuesday, a Republican member of the upper Congressional chamber blocked that resolution.
This time around, Georgia’s David Perdue shot down the efforts.
He said:
‘We need to focus on funding the federal government and confirming this president’s nominees… This resolution is no more than political theater.’
Perdue ignores the element of “political theater” inherent in a president of the United States siding with an adversarial, dictatorial foreign leader over their nation’s own intelligence community.
Before Trump proclaimed that he saw no reason to believe Russia had meddled in the 2016 U.S. elections, he had met with Putin privately. Flake and Coons included a call for the release of notes from that meeting in their resolution blocked Tuesday. The only individuals present during the one-on-one Trump/Putin summit were translators, and since the summit concluded, Trump has tended to be elusive about what was or wasn’t agreed to or discussed.
On Monday, he said that he and Putin had “merely talked about future benefits for both countries.”
The U.S. president holding secretive negotiations with a dictator constitutes a wild act of political theater, but Perdue prefers to stick to the idea that there’s nothing to see here and no reason to be alarmed.
Last week, the first time that Flake and Coons introduced their measure, second-in-command Senate Republican John Cornyn of Texas blocked it.
In the wake of a second block, Flake shared that he would bring his resolution up again. The issue remains relevant both thanks to the ongoing threat of Russian meddling and the president’s continued willful ignorance of that threat.
As recently as Sunday, Trump wrote on Twitter:
‘So President Obama knew about Russia before the Election. Why didn’t he do something about it?.. Because it is all a big hoax, that’s why, and he thought Crooked Hillary was going to win!!!’
Trump claimed the Russia scandal to be a “big hoax” days after the White House first began scrambling to pick up the pieces left by the president’s comments offered standing next to Putin.
Russian government-affiliated hackers targeting power companies got far enough as recently as last year to be free to cause blackouts if they so desired, the Department of Homeland Security revealed recently.
Officials outside of the West Wing have largely been left attempting to handle the threat, because President Trump consistently refuses to get on those efforts’ side despite their severity. He went so far off the edge this week that he claimed Russians will meddle in the midterm elections in favor of Democrats, acting like someone who has corruption to hide.
Featured Image via YouTube screenshot
