On Wednesday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show,” former Secretary of State and 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton called for Congress to look at transcripts of calls between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in light of the whistleblower Ukraine controversy.
Clinton said, “He, obviously, used taxpayer funded assistance, passed by the Congress on a bipartisan basis, to both threaten an intimidate the new president of Ukraine, to investigate his political opponents for the purpose of advancing his own re-election. Now, that has so many elements in it and it’s one of the reasons why I think it’s broken through to the American people. It also is troubling that Ukraine has been a subject of constant pressure from Vladimir Putin and the Russian interests in Ukraine.”
She continued, “So you have the Trump administration, the president, the vice president, others actually pressuring a new president who has a part of his country invaded and occupied by Russian troops, and putting this poor new president in this vice. You think you are going to get military aid from us? Well, we have a favor to ask of you. Now, we know that the aggressiveness of Putin has been unchecked and, in fact, I would argue actually accelerated in both rhetoric and potential adverse actions to our interests because of what Trump has made clear that he supports and looks to Vladimir Putin. So Ukraine is a very specific example of what is at stake. But I don’t think it’s the only example that we could find if we looked at the transcripts of the calls with Vladimir Putin, for example.”
She added, “We still have no notes, no reporting about the many meetings and the many calls. we do know that in the oval office early in his term trump basically said to the foreign secretary of Russia, Sergei Lavrov, to the then Ambassador Kislyak ‘Hey, I don’t mind that interference in the election, wink-wink.’ So this is about Ukraine, but Ukraine is the canary in the coal mine about what this president and his allies have been up to.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
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