Indeed, President Trump
continues to try to meet one-on-one with his Russian counterpart, despite the fact that, to a normal White House, the very last thing the president should want to do is be seen pow-wowing with the foreign leader whom America’s spy agencies have named as a hostile actor who meddles in our elections. It’s difficult to understand how a face-to-face meeting with Putin can help Trump in the multiple investigations he’s facing about his ties to…Putin.
Then there’s the fact that the Trump administration has been slow-rolling efforts to push back against Kremlin lies and propaganda. Last December, Congress passed and the president signed into law a State Department effort to finally start debunking propaganda emanating from Russia of the noxious kind which played an insidious role in our 2016 election. Contrary to the law, nothing of consequence has been done over the past half-year, and the State Department
still has no functioning effort to counter Kremlin lies.
That said, Foggy Bottom’s decisions regarding the Russians now appear worse than merely ignoring the will of Congress. According to a
new report from
Politico, State is derelict in its duty to monitor the activities of Russian diplomats in our country. Keep in mind that not less than one-third of those diplomats are actually spies, and they are supposed to report to the State Department when they plan to travel more than 25 miles from their duty station, customarily with 48 hours’ notice.
That gives the FBI and other American counterspies time to prepare to monitor illegal Russian espionage activities in our country. Yet, to the frustration of our Intelligence Community, State is failing to force compliance from Russian “diplomats,” despite the fact that Congress in May ordered the department to get serious about its counterintelligence responsibilities here.
This is a touchy matter because Russian “diplomats” have become increasingly aggressive in their espionage in America. It got worse under Obama, whose White House never took countering foreign espionage very seriously, and has exploded since Trump moved into the Oval Office. Russian spies have been observed roaming across America at will, without any pushback from State, which is supposed to supervise their activities and punish violations.
Nobody’s stopping these aggressive Russian spy-games, as
Politico reported a few weeks ago...