'I Cannot Understand Putin's Hold on Trump' - H.R. McMaster WSJ

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Putin, a ruthless former KGB operator, played to Trump’s ego and insecurities with flattery. Putin had described Trump as “a very outstanding person, talented, without any doubt,” and Trump had revealed his vulnerability to this approach, his affinity for strongmen and his belief that he alone could forge a good relationship with Putin: “It is always a great honor to be so nicely complimented by a man so highly respected within his own country.” Moreover, Trump’s tendency toward moral equivalence made him relatively unconcerned about some of Putin’s brazen acts of aggression. When Fox News host Bill O’Reilly asked Trump in February 2017 why he respected Putin even though “he’s a killer,” the newly inaugurated president responded, “There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. What do you think? Our country’s so innocent?”

So, on Putin and Russia, I had been swimming upstream with the president from the beginning. But our relationship reached a breaking point after I attended the Munich Security Conference in February 2018. In the speech I delivered at the conference—which immediately followed a speech by Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov—I emphasized the need to counter the proliferation and use of the most destructive and heinous weapons on earth, defeat jihadist terrorists and reform international institutions that had been subverted and turned against their purpose.

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I described evidence cited in the Mueller investigation’s indictments of Russians for election interference in 2016 as “incontrovertible.”

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Predictably, John Kelly, the White House chief of staff, called me to tell me the president was furious. I offered to call the president and clarify that we were talking about separate questions. First, did Russia meddle in the election? Second, did the Kremlin favor one candidate over another? And third, did the Russian interference have an effect on the election result? The answer to the first question was yes. As to question two, I believed that the Kremlin did not care who won the 2016 American election, as long as a large number of citizens doubted the legitimacy of the result. And there was no way to determine the answer to the third question.

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About two weeks later, on March 4, 2018, former Russian military intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter were poisoned in Salisbury, England, with a banned military-grade nerve agent that was easily traced to Moscow. Russian spy agencies—the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) and the military Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU)—were the perpetrators. The use of a nerve agent had placed hundreds, maybe thousands, of lives at risk. It was with this particularly heinous method that Putin had apparently decided to assassinate Skripal, a former KGB double agent who had been imprisoned for 13 years in Russia but was then released by Moscow in an exchange in July 2010, the biggest spy swap since the Cold War.

Just a few days after the poisoning of Skripal and his daughter, a story appeared in the New York Post with the headline “Putin Heaps Praise on Trump, Pans U.S. Politics.” When I walked into the Oval Office that evening, on another matter, the president had a copy of the article and was writing a note to the Russian leader across the page with a fat black Sharpie. He asked me to get the clipping to Putin. I took it with me. When I got home that night, I confided to my wife Katie, “After over a year in this job, I cannot understand Putin’s hold on Trump.”

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