In the wake of plugging a US-Russia partnership on cyber security, it looks as though all President Donald Trump needs to change his mind is a little less love from his Republican cronies.
Since agreeing to create a cyber security unit to guard against election hacking with cyber security extraordinaire Russian president Vladimir Putin, Trump is backing away after criticism from GOP senators Lindsey Graham (SC), John McCain (Az.), and Marco Rubio (Fla.)
Following talks at the G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany last week, Trump tweeted Sunday he and Putin discussed:
“Forming an impenetrable Cyber Security unit so that election hacking, & many other negative things, will be guarded and safe.”
On NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday morning, Sen. Graham stated that working with Russia on cyber security was:
“Not the dumbest idea I have ever heard but it’s pretty close.”
Sen. McCain chairs the Senate armed services committee. He told CBS’s Face the Nation:
“There has been no penalty. Vladimir Putin … got away with literally trying to change the outcome … of our election. Yes, it’s time to move forward. But there has to be a price to pay.”
Marco Rubio compared the deal to working with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad on a chemical weapons unit.
House Intelligence Committee head Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) told CNN’s State of the Union:
“If that’s our best election defense, we might as well just mail our ballot boxes to Moscow.”
Late Sunday, Trump tweeted:
“The fact that President Putin and I discussed a Cyber Security unit doesn’t mean I think it can happen. It can’t-but a ceasefire can, & did!”
US ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, dismisses claims that creating the cyber security unit is tantamount to placing implicit trust in Russia.
She said:
“Everybody knows that Russia meddled in our elections. We can’t trust Russia and we won’t ever trust Russia. But you keep those that you don’t trust closer so that you can always keep an eye on ‘em and keep them in check.”
Moscow, of course, denies influencing our election’s outcome, and Trump maintains his stance that his campaign did not collude with Russia.
However, yesterday Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr, proved he was informed in an email prior to a meeting with Russian attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya in which he would obtain malicious information about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as part of the Russian government’s endeavor help get Donald Trump elected.
Some are regarding this as the “smoking gun” in the ongoing investigation over whether or not the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government to undermine the 2016 election through cyber hacks and anti-Hillary Clinton propaganda, mostly through social media.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSGjh7mXlzw
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