Senior Republicans are giving Donald Trump the benefit of the doubt that he’ll make Moscow pay a price for hacking the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, yet the president-elect may face a rift with members of his own party if policies against Russia don’t change.
In an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said he and Senator John McCain of Arizona plan to introduce legislation for tougher sanctions against Russia, hitting the country in the financial and energy sectors “where they’re the weakest.”
Graham also said he supports a permanent U.S. military training presence in Ukraine, Georgia and the Baltic states, according to a transcript provided by the network.
“We’re going to give President Trump an opportunity to make Russia pay a price for interfering in our election so it will deter others in the future,” Graham said. “I hope he will take advantage of it.”
Graham said he thinks Trump is worried that delving into what Russia did during the election campaign will undermine his legitimacy in the Oval Office.
“I don’t know what drives him on Russia, but I do know this. That if our policies don’t change vis-a-vis Russia, the worst is yet to come,” Graham said. “And the Congress is going to have a different view on Russia than the president-elect does.”
Trump on Saturday suggested warmer relations were coming between the Washington and Moscow, a day after U.S. intelligence chiefs briefed him on the evidence tying interference in the election campaign to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“Having a good relationship with Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing,” Trump said in a series of three tweets. “Only ‘stupid’ people, or fools, would think it is bad! We have enough problems around the world without yet another one.”
McCain, also speaking on NBC, said the Senate Armed Services Committee, which he chairs, will continue to conduct hearings around cyber threats. McCain said he supports appointing a special Senate committee to investigate the campaign hacking, rather than having several committees do their own probes.
Trump’s approach to Russia is expected to be debated on Jan. 11 at the confirmation hearing for Rex Tillerson, his nominee for secretary of state, before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Panel members have said they’ll press Tillerson, the former chief executive officer of Exxon Mobil Corp., about his years of friendly business dealings with Putin.
While Committee Chairman Bob Corker said on Friday that Tillerson’s views on Russia “are not in any way out of the mainstream,” the Tennessee Republican added that Russia has done “very nefarious things.”
Similarly, Graham said Tillerson has to convince him that as a career oilman he sees Putin as undermining democracy with actions such as the hacking attacks, and that new sanctions are justified.
“I’m looking for a secretary of state who understands Russia and understands the world as it really is. I had a great meeting with him,” Graham said. “I hope he can articulate to the American people that he understands Putin has been a disruptive force when it comes to democracy.”
There has been no official comment from Moscow on the report, which was released as Russia observed Orthodox Christmas.
But Alexei Pushkov, an influential member of the upper house of parliament, said on Twitter that “all the accusations against Russia are based on ‘confidence’ and suppositions. The USA in the same way was confident about (Iraqi leader Saddam) Hussein having weapons of mass destruction.”
Margarita Simonyan, the editor of government-funded satellite TV channel RT who is frequently mentioned in the U.S. report, said in a blog post: “Dear CIA: what you have written here is a complete fail.”
During the election, Trump praised the Russian strongman as a decisive leader, and argued that the two countries would benefit from a better working relationship – though attempts by the Obama administration at a “Russian reset” have proved unsuccessful.
At the same time, intelligence officials believe that Russia isn’t done intruding in U.S. politics and policymaking.
Immediately after the Nov. 8 election, Russia began a “spear-phishing” campaign to try to trick people into revealing their email passwords, targeting U.S. government employees and think tanks that specialize in national security, defense and foreign policy, the unclassified version of the report said.
The report said Russian government provided hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, to the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks. The website’s founder, Julian Assange, has denied that it got the emails it released from the Russian government. The report noted that the emails could have been passed through middlemen.
Russia also used state-funded propaganda and paid “trolls” to make nasty comments on social media services, the report said. Intelligence officials say Moscow will apply lessons learned from its activities in the election to put its thumbprint on future elections in the United States and allied nations.
The public report was minus classified details that intelligence officials shared with President Barack Obama on Thursday.
In an interview with The Associated Press after the briefing, Trump said he “learned a lot” from his discussions with intelligence officials, but he declined to say whether he accepted their assertion that Russia had intruded in the election on his behalf.
Trump has said he will appoint a team within three months of taking office to develop a plan to “aggressively combat and stop cyberattacks.”
The Associated Press contributed.