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| Photo by Grigory Dukor/Reuters via Al Jazeera. |
included a “promise” that was regarded as so troubling that it prompted an official in the U.S. intelligence community to file a formal whistleblower complaint with the inspector general for the intelligence community, said the officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.Well, our source, the Washington Post, takes us through a list of Trump's contacts with foreign leaders in the weeks before the complaint was filed on 12 August that includes exactly one phone call:
Among them was a call with Russian President Vladimir Putin that the White House initiated on July 31. Trump also received at least two letters from North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during the summer, describing them as “beautiful” messages. In June, Trump said publicly that he was opposed to certain CIA spying operations against North Korea. Referring to a Wall Street Journal report that the agency had recruited Kim’s half-brother, Trump said, “I would tell him that would not happen under my auspices.” Trump met with other foreign leaders at the White House in July, including the prime minister of Pakistan, the prime minister of the Netherlands, and the emir of Qatar.I'd just like to note one thing, which is that the Putin phone call (which the White House readout said was all about the ongoing Russian wildfire emergency, and I snark-guessed Trump's offer to help rake the Russian forests) was three days before the United States formally withdrew from the 1987 Intermediate-level Nuclear Forces Treaty, a step that I thought at the time Putin was not very upset about,
That is, the mid-range missiles that are forbidden under the INF treaty that Trump is gleefully tearing to pieces; as could have been, and probably was predicted, the truly gleeful one is Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, who has dived into violating it right away, almost before the six-month waiting period has even gotten started (while publicly deploring Trump's abrogation of it in deeply tsk-tsk terms, which will allow Trump to cite this as an instance of how he was "tough" with the Russian president). North Ossetia is just across the border from South Ossetia, one of the territories Putin stole from the Georgian Republic in 2012 in what was probably a bigger land grab, proportionately, than all the land Russia has stolen in the Ukraine.and which got a number of smart folks indeed upset (my original idea was that Putin wanted to violate the treaty more extensively than Russia has done so far but wanted the US to be blamed for it, and my national security chops aren't good enough for me to speculate any further than that):
I'd been thinking there was something exceedingly funky about the treaty abrogation for some months, as it happens, ever since the Trump administration announced it:If Donald weren't so stupid I'd assume he and Putin planned it together. But you must bear most of the responsibility yourself.— Liable Suit (@Yastreblyansky) August 2, 2019
Yet there they were planning a summit in Paris, on Veterans Day no less. Putin complained about the treaty getting broken, but he couldn't stop smiling and telling jokes. What, in the first place, was up with that? https://t.co/52fvxH8nLd— Liable Suit (@Yastreblyansky) November 11, 2018
Was Putin extracting a promise from Trump relating to this? As I type, old CIA guy Ned Price, representing the (retired) intelligence community on MSNBC, is telling us that the Russian as opposed to the American readout of the 31 July phone call suggested that "fully-fledged bilateral relations could be restored in the future" without clarifying under what circumstances. Nobody's mentioning the INF at all so far, which is kind of what's making me type this unconsidered thing, but the fact that this was at a moment when relations between the US and Russia appeared to most of the world to be reaching a frightening low but Putin and Trump didn't seem bothered at all makes me wonder...
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