Pompeo slams Trump’s defense of Putin in 2018 as ‘mistake’: Book
Cami Mondeaux
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Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo criticized former President Donald Trump for his decision to defend Russian President Vladimir Putin during a press conference in 2018, a moment the former Trump ally called a “mistake,” according to a forthcoming book.
In his new book Never Give an Inch, Pompeo described his reaction when the former president defended Putin among questions that Russia had sought to influence the 2016 election to ensure Trump’s victory. The defense came during a July 2018 press conference when Trump brushed off suggestions that Russia had meddled with the election despite U.S. intelligence indicating the Kremlin sought to boost Trump’s candidacy.
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“To stand next to Putin and say that he believed Putin’s claims that he didn’t meddle in the U.S. election was very Trumpian,” Pompeo wrote, according to a copy of the book obtained by Axios. “It was also a mistake. It lacked the depth to address the question that had come from the American reporter: ‘Do you hold Russia at all accountable for anything in particular?’ Trump’s answer reflected his inability or refusal to separate the Russia Hoax from the fact that Russia had tried to sow chaos in the 2016 election.”
Instead, Trump continually conflated findings that the Russian government had influenced the election with claims that he had directly colluded with the Kremlin to ensure his victory, according to Pompeo.
During the 2016 election, the Russian government launched an operation called Project Lakhta that sought to boost Trump’s candidacy over then-Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. As part of the project, Putin ordered the Russian government to hack computer networks affiliated with the Democratic Party to leak damaging information about Clinton, according to a report from the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee in August 2020.
Putin has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.
The alleged interference prompted an FBI investigation headed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, which found that the “sweeping and systematic” Russian interference “violated U.S. criminal law,” according to his final report released in March 2019. However, he did not find any evidence of collusion between Trump and the Russian government — leading the former president to denounce the findings as the “Russia Hoax.”
“For Trump, every question about Russia and the elections was poisoned by the narrative of the Russia Hoax,” Pompeo wrote. “These horrible lies about him … were connected in Trump’s mind to the Russian government’s chaos campaign.”
A report released in January 2023 later found that Russia’s attempted interference did little to change “attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior” in the 2016 election.
Several of Trump’s allies criticized his defense of Putin shortly after the 2018 press conference, with many GOP leaders urging him to be wary of relations with the Russian government. Trump later justified his comments, arguing a strong relationship with the Kremlin was important for the two countries.
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“As I said today and many times before, ‘I have GREAT confidence in MY intelligence people,’” Trump said in a tweet shortly after the press conference. “However, I also recognize that in order to build a brighter future, we cannot exclusively focus on the past – as the world’s two largest nuclear powers, we must get along!”
Never Give an Inch is scheduled to be released on Tuesday. The book is likely to pit Trump and Pompeo against one another as the latter mulls a presidential bid in 2024. Trump has already launched a White House campaign.