House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) slammed President Donald Trump on Friday for inviting Russian President Vladimir Putin to Washington, D.C., this fall.
In a statement, Pelosi said:
The notion that President Trump would invite a tyrant to Washington is beyond belief. Putin’s ongoing attacks on our elections and on Western democracies and his illegal actions in Crimea and the rest of Ukraine deserve the fierce, unanimous condemnation of the international community, not a VIP ticket to our nation’s capital.
Pelosi also issued a warning to Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-WI), telling him not to invite Putin to address Congress — often a courtesy extended to visiting foreign leaders:
President Trump’s frightened fawning over Putin is an embarrassment, and a grave threat to our democracy. An invitation to address a Joint Meeting of Congress should be bipartisan and Speaker Ryan must immediately make clear that there is not — and never will be — an invitation for a thug like Putin to address the United States Congress.
In 2007, shortly after becoming Speaker of the House, Pelosi traveled to Syria to meet with dictator Bashar al-Assad (above), to show that the U.S. was capable of using diplomacy and not merely war as a tool of foreign policy in the Middle East.
Assad, already a brutal dictator, went on to become a mass murderer, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians in the ongoing Syrian civil war.
More recently, Pelosi claimed falsely last year that she had never met with then-Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Photo evidence proved otherwise.
Pelosi plans to return as Speaker if Democrats win the House of Representatives in the November midterm elections.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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