US President Donald Trump appears to be backing away from the idea of working with Russia to create a “cybersecurity unit” to guard against election hacking.
Trump on Sunday morning tweeted about discussing such a unit with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Yet it is Russia that US intelligence officials blame for meddling in last year’s US presidential election.
Widespread ridicule greeted Trump’s tweet.
Republican US Senator Lindsey Graham called it “pretty close” to the dumbest idea he has ever heard.
Democratic US Representative Adam Schiff said expecting Russia to be a credible partner in any cybersecurity initiative “would be dangerously naive.”
By Sunday evening, Trump was tweeting a different tune.
He wrote that just because he and Putin discussed the idea “doesn’t mean I think it can happen. It can’t.”
US Senator Marco Rubio said on Twitter that “partnering with Putin on a ‘Cyber Security Unit’ is akin to partnering with Assad on a ‘Chemical Weapons Unit.’”
Former US secretary of defense Ashton Carter equated the move to “like the guy who robbed your house proposing a working group on burglary.”
US Representative Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the US House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, said that expecting Russia to be a credible partner in any cybersecurity initiative “would be dangerously naive for this country.”
“If that’s our best election defense, we might as well just mail our ballot boxes to Moscow,” he said.
However, US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley defended the move, saying that working with Russia on cybersecurity “doesn’t mean we ever trust Russia. 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 them and keep them in check.”
Trump said that “it is time to move forward in working constructively with Russia” after his lengthy meeting with Putin.
However, he is still avoiding the question of whether he accepts Putin’s denial that Russia was responsible for meddling in the US election.
Speaking in a series of tweets on Sunday, the morning after returning from a world leaders’ summit in Hamburg, Germany, Trump said he “strongly pressed” Putin twice over Russian meddling during their meeting on Friday.
Trump said that Putin “vehemently denied” the conclusions of US intelligence agencies that Russian hackers and propagandists tried to sway the election in Trump’s favor.
However, Trump would not say whether he believed Putin, tweeting only that he is “already given my opinion.”
Trump has said he thinks Russia probably hacked the e-mails of the Democratic National Committee and former US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton staffers, but that “other people and/or countries” were likely involved as well.
“Nobody knows for sure,” he said ahead of the meeting.
Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov on Friday told reporters in Germany that Trump had accepted Putin’s assurances that Russia had not meddled — an assertion Putin repeated Saturday after the G20 summit.
Putin said he left the meeting thinking that Trump had believed his in-person denials.
“He asked questions, I replied. It seemed to me that he was satisfied with the answers,” Putin said.
The discussion between Putin and Trump does not mean the two nations will start tackling the issue together already tomorrow, a Russian official said yesterday.
“Probably, Trump is not ready yet [for this joint work] at this stage,” Svetlana Lukash, a Russian sherpa at the G20 summit, told a news conference.
Putin and Trump discussed cybersecurity for 40 minutes, Lukash said.
She did not rule out that, in the end, a jointcyber security commission could be either a US-Russian bilateral unit or a UN-sponsored effort.
Additional reporting by Reuters
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