Trump’s campaign issued a statement last week disputing Woodward’s reporting. “None of these fabrications by Bob Woodward are true,” campaign communications director Stephen Chan said in a statement. But since then, the Kremlin has denied that Putin ever spoke to the former president, but acknowledged that Trump sent the testing equipment.
Despite the Russian president’s domestic repression, foreign aggression and hostility toward the United States, Mr. Trump has long expressed admiration for Mr. Putin. He said Putin was “very wise” to invade Ukraine in 2022, criticized U.S. military aid to Ukraine, and said Russia was “very wise” to attack NATO allies with insufficient military budgets. He said he would “encourage” them to do whatever they wanted.
Mr. Trump pursued Mr. Kerry during his presidency for talking with Iranian officials about preserving the nuclear deal that the former diplomat negotiated under President Barack Obama and from which Mr. Trump withdrew the United States. Trump claimed this was a violation of the Logan Act, a 1799 law that prohibits private citizens from interfering in diplomatic relations with foreign governments. “Frankly, he should be indicted for that,” Trump told reporters in 2019.
However, the Logan Act has never been successfully prosecuted and is considered unconstitutional by some scholars. But that didn’t deter Trump. In meeting after meeting, he repeatedly accused Attorney General William P. Barr of indicting Mr. Kelly.
At the request of the Justice Department, New York U.S. Attorney Jeffrey S. Berman spent a year evaluating the case, which he later described in his memoir as a false prosecution. concluded.
Unwilling to take no for an answer, the Justice Department then asked another U.S. attorney from Maryland, Robert K. Hur, to investigate Kelly, only to find that Kelly came to the same conclusion. It was. But Trump wasn’t satisfied with that. “As long as Mr. Trump is president, and perhaps beyond, he will seek out a lawyer willing to prosecute Mr. Kelly,” former national security adviser John R. Bolton wrote in his memoir. are.
