David Pratt: Trump and Putin go face to face

It was the first by Mueller that directly charges the Russian Government with interfering in the election, which Trump unexpectedly won.

By any standards one might expect such an indictment would bring outrage from any US president and almost certainly put the kibosh on any impending talks between US and Russian leaders. But Donald Trump is not just any US president and on Friday he responded to the news in typically unpredictable fashion.

“I think that we’re being hurt very badly by the, I would call it, the witch hunt – I would call it the rigged witch hunt,” Trump said accusingly of Mueller’s indictment while at a press conference with Theresa May at Chequers.

“I think that really hurts our country and it really hurts our relationship with Russia. I think that we would have a chance to have a very good relationship with Russia and a very good chance – a very good relationship with President Putin,” Trump added, to the astonishment of many senior American officials back home in the US.

It’s no secret that Trump has long been scathing – and some might argue running scared – of the Mueller investigation which he has called a hoax and now witch-hunt.

But the timing of Friday’s indictment, on the eve of Trump’s major summit with Putin, seems like a poke in the eye to the US president from those within the law enforcement agencies, of whom the president has been dismissive or critical and some say obstructive during the Russia investigation.

“It’s an enormous show of strength on the part of federal law enforcement,” Ben Wittes, Editor-in-chief of the US based Lawfare website told NBC news.

The timing was also significant, says Wittes, because it also came the day after House Republicans spent nearly 10 hours berating an FBI agent who helped launch the investigation into Russian election interference.

But Trump’s reaction to the news while at Chequers has shocked many within the US political and media arena who insist that the president’s first reaction should have been to roundly condemn Moscow and cancel his meeting with Putin in Helsinki tomorrow.

“You might expect that an American president, presented with the indictment of a dozen Russian military officers for engaging in a concerted, years long cyber attack on American democracy, would be outraged and demand justice,” observed a scathing opinion piece by the editorial board of The New York Times on Friday.

“Donald Trump is outraged, all right. But his anger is directed at his fellow Americans. He shows no sign of cancelling his meeting scheduled for Monday with the Russian president…or insisting on, say, the extradition of the defendants to stand trial. He is instead reserving his fire and fury for the investigation itself, " the piece accused.

Trump has previously said he takes Putin at his word, believing his claim that the Kremlin played no role in hacking into the 2016 election. But increasingly such an assertion flies in the face of Trump's own intelligence community and the US Justice Department.

Inevitably Mueller’s indictment, Trump’s reaction to it and insistence in going ahead with tomorrow ‘s summit has cast the spotlight on the wider state of US-Russia relations. Many US politicians feel the time is long overdue for Trump to play hardball with Putin and the place to start would be by calling off tomorrow’s talks that includes a one-on-one session with only interpreters present.

A number of prominent US political figures have made just such a call, among them Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican and long-time Putin antagonist.

“Glad-handing with Vladimir Putin on the heels of these indictments would be an insult to our democracy,” said Schumer, a New York Democrat.

McCain insisted that Trump should not go to Helsinki unless he is ready to show the Russian leader that “there will be a serious price to pay for his ongoing aggression towards the United States and democracies around the world”.

Officials from the previous administration also waded into the controversy and criticism of Trump.

“I would not have the summit,” Tom Donilon, an Obama administration national security adviser, told CNN.

“The President has never really come to grips with the entire list of active hostility against the United States by the Russian Federation, directed by President Putin,” he said. “I would not go forward with this thing.”

But on Friday Trump, while pledging to raise election meddling with Putin, also gave the impression that he was unlikely to do too much to challenge Putin’s certain denials. At times he was almost sneeringly dismissive of Mueller’s indictment and calls to cancel the summit.

“I don't think you'll have any Gee, I did it, I did it, you got me,” Trump responded.

“There won't be a Perry Mason here, I don't think. But you never know what happens, right? But I will absolutely firmly ask the question.”

For its part Moscow was equally indignant of Mueller’s charges and its own response mirrored Trump’s own rhetoric in a way some observers say was unlikely to have been a coincidence.

On Friday the Russian foreign ministry said there was no evidence that the 12 people charged were linked to military intelligence or hacking. “Washington is struggling to reanimate old 'fake news' about alleged Russian interference in the US presidential election in 2016,” the ministry said in a statement.

“Obviously, the purpose of this bogus story is to spoil the atmosphere before the Russian-American summit,” it continued, before adding with a strange and mischievous twist that instigators of the intrigue would sooner or later be held accountable for the damage they “continue to inflict on American democracy”.

So what do these latest dramatic developments mean for tomorrow’s meeting between the two leaders?

Many observers, analysts and diplomats are of the view that while the Kremlin rushed out Friday’s statement slamming Mueller’s indictment, it has little cause to worry.

All last week Trump, first by berating Nato then his criticisms of Theresa May over Brexit and trade deals, have only served to strengthen Putin’s hand in Helsinki.

“For Putin, this is like the stars are aligning,” given how the last week has unfolded for Trump in Europe, said Brett Bruen, who led a US inter-agency task force in the Obama administration to combat Russian propaganda.

“If I was trying to write a script for how Putin could set up the summit with Trump for maximum impact on Russia's strategic objectives, I don't think I could have done a better job than what Trump has accomplished,” Bruen told CBC.

Like many Russia watchers and those looking at where the summit might lead, Bruen is sceptical Trump will be able to achieve much, beyond hyping that the summit materialised and that Putin – like North Korean leader Kim Jong-un at the recent Singapore summit – openly gave the US president a symbolic gesture of good will.

Beyond the posturing there is no shortage of contentious issues for both men to confront.

For his part Putin will be seeking agreement with the Americans to stop pressing Russia over its intervention in Ukraine. Putin, of course, would also like to see some relief from sanctions imposed on Russia.

If Trump is serious about bringing back something tangible from the meeting he might look to get Moscow’s support in keeping the squeeze on North Korea, or fighting international terrorism and securing some degree of adherence by Russia on international arms agreements.

Reassurances of no more Russian hacking and election meddling aside, Trump must also be looking to get Putin’s help subduing the situation in Syria and allowing some space for opposition forces to remain intact.

Then there is vexed question of Iran, an issue with which Trump and the hawkish elements within his administration, notably National Security Adviser John Bolton, have long been preoccupied.

As recently reported in the respected US-based magazine Foreign Policy, Trump is said to be eager for a deal in which Russia would use its influence to contain Iran’s expanding military presence in Syria, especially close to Israel’s northern border.

In exchange, Washington would consent to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s re-conquest of most of the country, acknowledge Russia’s role as Syria’s dominant outside power, and commit to the withdrawal of several thousand US troops from key terrain they currently hold in southern and eastern Syria.

But while all these issues under normal circumstance might be expected to be part of any formal agenda,Trump himself has already described the summit as “a loose meeting,” something that worries many US officials, fearful of the concessions he might make, not least in those sessions where no advisers are present.

Senior US officials say the whole approach to the summit is unprecedented in terms of meetings between an American president and his Russian counterpart.

According to journalist Susan B. Glasser who writes a "Life in Trump’s Washington" column for The New Yorker, “one preparatory trip (made by John Bolton). no formal agenda and no 'deliverables' is not normal for a summit between the heads of the world’s two biggest nuclear-armed nations.”

More than ever now, with Trump arriving in Finland carrying the additional baggage of the Mueller probes, his approach to Putin will be under particular scrutiny. Will he be deferential or demanding, full of praise or heavy on pressure?

“Having hit a post-Cold War low, the US-Russia relationship could use a push toward a better state. A summit could do that, but only if Trump is disciplined in how he prepares for and deals with Putin,” wrote Steven Pifer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington earlier this month.

“A successful summit in Helsinki requires that Trump confront Putin candidly on issues where Russia is misbehaving,” he wrote even before Mueller’s latest bombshell.

“That is important if he wants to earn Putin's respect. It is also important for how the summit will be seen back home.”

Yesterday they were making the final preparations in Helsinki, with the announcement that Trump and Putin would meet at the 19th-century Presidential Palace, located a stone’s throw away from the capital's iconic waterfront Market Square. Though both have met twice before on the sidelines of international meetings, tomorrow will be their first official stand-alone meeting.

As most observers are quick to point out, these are very different days from when former President George HW Bush and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev held talks at the same venue in 1990.

Trump has, to say the least, had a combative and controversial past week from Brussels to London, one that will doubtless bolster Putin as he heads to Helsinki. But nowhere will they be bracing themselves more for what might emerge from tomorrow’s meeting than in Washington. The ghost of Russian election meddling continues to haunt the US president there more persistently than ever.