This week Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump once again played interference for Russia, saying there is not enough evidence to implicate them in the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 and the Democratic National Committee hacking.
A comprehensive Dutch investigation into MH17 has confirmed what US intelligence officials have known all along: the passenger plane was struck down by Russian-made weapons. Trump has yet to respond to the new report released by Dutch investigators. In repeatedly denying Russia’s alleged involvement, Trump has rejected the conclusions of the US intelligence community, which believes “with confidence” that pro-Russian separatists in Eastern Ukraine deliberately shot down the plane.
Giving credence to the Kremlin’s claims, the Republican presidential nominee has at times assumed the role of defense attorney for Moscow. In an interview with CNN last October, Trump flirted with the notion that Russia really wasn’t involved in the MH17 tragedy.
“It’s disgusting and disgraceful but Putin and Russia say they didn’t do it, the other side said they did, no one really knows who did it, probably Putin knows who did it. Possibly it was Russia but they are totally denying it,” Trump said, adding, “They say it wasn’t them. It may have been their weapon, but they didn’t use it, they didn’t fire it, they even said the other side fired it to blame them. I mean to be honest with you, you’ll probably never know for sure.”
Failing to acknowledge that Vladimir Putin himself doesn’t have to personally pull the trigger for the Russian government to be culpable in arming, training, and dispatching soldiers from across the border into Ukraine to occupy the Crimean peninsula, Trump echoed Kremlin talking points and fed the narrative that a local uprising led by spontaneously-armed, highly-organized Russian-speaking militias simply came to exercise territorial control over sovereign Ukrainian territory in opposition to Kiev’s pro-European sentiments.
Flight MH17 was shot down over territory occupied by Russian troops who have simply taken off their official insignia from their uniforms, or as Moscow likes to call them, “pro-Russian separatists.” The flight was shot down by a Russian-made rocket and warhead.
In his latest debate with Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton on Monday, Trump tried to refute the assertion that Russian state-sponsored actors were behind a series of high-profile cyber-attacks against the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and other US targets. The fact that Trump recently received an intelligence briefing by US national security officials detailing Russia’s clear involvement in the cyber-attacks only lent credence to claims that the GOP nominee’s fondness for the dictator of Russia was too close for comfort.
“Trump has praised Putin during the campaign, and at the first presidential debate, on Sept. 26, he said it wasn’t clear the Russians were behind the DNC hack,” reports Time Magazine. “But the U.S. intelligence community has ‘high confidence’ that Russian intelligence services were in fact responsible, multiple intelligence and national security officials tell TIME. Trump was informed of that assessment during a recent classified intelligence briefing, a U.S. official familiar with the matter tells TIME.”
Even after facing media scrutiny in the wake of his contentious debate, Trump refused to back down from his Russia-friendly rhetoric. Here’s what he told Time in a statement this week:
I do not comment on information I receive in intelligence briefings, however, nobody knows with definitive certainty that this was in fact Russia. It may be, but it may also be China, another country or individual.
Trump is right about one thing, though. He can shoot somebody on 5th Avenue and he likely would not lose support among his most devout followers. But for the rest of us, Trump’s dangerous flirtations with Putin can no longer be cast aside as an amusing sideshow. In the last two weeks alone, Kremlin-backed hackers have brazenly publicized the fact they were able to infiltrate and steal data from a major US political party. Moscow isn’t trying to even keep it a secret anymore.