GOP Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (PA-8) was not impressed with the Helsinki summit, feeling that Vladimir Putin clearly had the upper hand. NPR:
“The president was manipulated by Vladimir Putin,” Fitzpatrick said. “Vladimir Putin is a master manipulator.”
Fitzpatrick sits on the House committees on Foreign Affairs and Homeland Security. In his previous role as an FBI special agent, he said he was assigned to Ukraine and worked on counterintelligence, collecting Russian propaganda reports.
He told [host Michel] Martin he was “frankly sickened by the exchange” between Trump and Putin.
He’s not the only member of Congress who used to work in the intelligence community. Fitzpatrick said he shared his view with former CIA agent and fellow Republican Will Hurd of Texas. Hurd wrote recently in the New York Times that Trump “actively participated in a Russian disinformation campaign.”
Fitzpatrick is actually doing something about election tampering, a subject he takes very seriously.
Fitzpatrick noted to NPR that he has co-sponsored a House bill in support of Mueller’s investigation; it was introduced in April but has yet to pass. He noted Sunday that “there’s not nearly enough” urgency in the White House regarding Russia’s role in the 2016 elections and decried the “mixed signals” sent on the subject by the administration.
“It needs to be accepted as fact by everybody in our government because we need to respond to that reality and it’s a significant threat. We cannot let that happen again,” Fitzpatrick said.
Trump made an egregious faux pas by disparaging the intelligence community, “Intelligence agencies should never have allowed this fake news to ‘leak’ into the public. One last shot at me. Are we living in Nazi Germany?” he said in a tweet in January, (referencing Russian election interference and the pee-pee tape.) He also said that day, “Russia has never tried to use leverage over me. “I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA – NO DEALS, NO LOANS, NO NOTHING!”
There’s sure much ado about no nothing.
Seriously?! Are we expected to believe one of New York’s greatest ever real estate negotiators, who now happens to be President of the USA, could be manipulated by a former Soviet spymaster on a worldwide broadcast? Absolutely preposterous!