Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell issued a statement on Tuesday reassuring European allies that the U.S. stands with them. His remarks come a day after President Donald Trump’s summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, The Washington Post reported.
“We value the NATO treaty,” McConnell declared at a weekly press conference, seeking to clean some of the fallout after Trump’s contentious meeting with NATO allies in Brussels earlier this month.
“We believe the European Union countries are our friends and the Russians are not,” McConnell told reporters. “We understand the Russian threat.”
McConnell also stated that the Russians have demonstrated their hostility by annexing Crimea, invading Ukraine and by interfering in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, adding that the evidence of those activities is “indisputable.”
McConnell said that his views are shared by almost everyone in the Senate GOP conference which finished meeting several minutes before the press conference.
He added that Republican lawmakers are looking into several legislative options to push back against Trump’s embrace of Putin.
“Sen. Rubio, for example, has got a bill that targets the 2018 election, the cycle we’re right in now,” McConnell noted. Republican Senator Marco Rubio sponsored a bill that would impose penalties on Russia if it again interferes with a U.S. election.
Meanwhile, Obama during the 2018 Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture in Johannesburg criticized Trump, saying that “strongman politics are ascending suddenly, whereby elections, some pretense of democracy, are maintained, the form of it.”
“Unfortunately, too much of politics today seems to reject the very concept of objective truth. People just make stuff up…we see the utter loss of shame among political leaders where they’re caught in a lie and they just double down.”
Obama also talked about the type of leaders that spread lies.
“We see the utter loss of shame in political leaders when they’re caught in a lie and they just double down and lie some more,” Obama said, warning that the undermining of facts and reality could “be democracy’s undoing.”
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