Trump on Russian interference in US elections - US also does it
According to the Washington Post report the opinion voiced by Trump led to the notes from the meeting being restricted.
By JERUSALEM POST STAFF, REUTERSU.S. President Donald Trump (photo credit: KEVIN LAMARQUE/REUTERS)
US President Donald Trump said in 2017 to top officials in the Russian government that he is not worried about possible Russian interference in US elections as the US itself, he allegedly claimed, did so in other countries. The statement led to the summary of the meeting being restricted, The Washington Post reported on Saturday. Trump's special representative for Ukraine, Kurt Volker, resigned on Friday, CNN reported, after being named in a whistleblower complaint relating to a July 25 phone call between Trump and Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy. According to the whistleblower complaint from within the intelligence community, Volker spoke with Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani to try to "contain the damage" from his efforts to press Ukraine to investigate Trump's political rival Joe Biden. Volker's resignation was first reported by the State Press, a student-run publication at Arizona State University, which backs a think tank where Volker serves as executive director.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Friday said the controversy over a phone call between the American and Ukrainian presidents has been blown out of proportion, dismissing a suggestion that Russia was behind it. "(US House Speaker) Nancy Pelosi said today that behind the incident - that is being blown out of proportion - around the telephone conversation between President Trump and President Zelenskiy, that it was Russia behind it all," he told reporters at the United Nations. "It's paranoia." Democrats in the House of Representatives have launched an impeachment inquiry after a whistleblower complaint that Trump solicited a political favor from Ukraine's president during the phone call that could help the Republican incumbent get re-elected. In an interview on Friday, Pelosi suggested that Russia may have been behind the matter. "By the way, I think Russia has a hand in this," Pelosi told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" program on Friday. In his 2007 book Legacy of Ashes: The history of the CIA, Tim Weiner writes how the American intelligence community was supporting right-wing parties in Italy and Japan during the post-war years to prevent Communist parties winning elections in such key countries during the Cold War.
