Sunday on MSNBC’s “PoliticsNation With Al Sharpton,” Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) said if President Donald Trump were not harsh on Russian President Vladimir Putin during their upcoming meeting it would amount to “commander-in-chief malpractice.”
Booker said, “Well, the president’s relationship with Putin has been disturbing, to say the least. This is a president who seems to have better relationships with someone who attacked the United States of America, even calling for him to rejoin the relationships with communities like he did when he was up in Canada. It is outrageous the way he treats him but then our allies, who we need, who have bled with us and fought with us in places like Afghanistan, he attacks them. And so this is now yet a further demonstration of what we already knew is that the Russians have attacked us, but their cyber attacks attacked the most sacrosanct element of a democracy—the voting process. This president, for him to go forward and meet and not make this a central point, to really go at Putin harder than he did, folks who have not reached their 2 percent goal yet, and they have years to go until their goal is reached. If he is talking to them in a harsher way, this is again commander-in-chief malpractice and someone not putting security at the center of his agenda.”
He added, “He has an obligation to make a center point of the meeting, the protection of the United States against the ongoing cyber attacks of the Russians. If he fails to go hard at Putin on these issues, he is really failing, this marks a failure as commander-in-chief.”
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