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Putin ‘Somewhat Weakened’ by Mutiny, Trump Says

WASHINGTON – Former U.S. President Donald Trump, a longtime admirer of Russian President Vladimir Putin, said Thursday that Putin has been “somewhat weakened” by an aborted mutiny and that now is the time for the United States to try to broker a negotiated peace settlement between Russia and Ukraine.

Speaking expansively about foreign policy in a telephone interview with Reuters, the front-runner in opinion polls for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination also said China should be given a 48-hour deadline to get out of what sources familiar with the matter say is a Chinese spy capability on the island of Cuba 145 kilometers off the U.S. coast.

On Ukraine, Trump did not rule out that the Kyiv government might have to concede some territory to Russia to stop the war, which began with Russian forces invading Ukraine 16 months ago. He said everything would be “subject to negotiation,” if he were president, but that Ukrainians who have waged a vigorous fight to defend their land have “earned a lot of credit.”

“I think they would be entitled to keep much of what they’ve earned, and I think that Russia likewise would agree to that. You need the right mediator, or negotiator, and we don’t have that right now,” he said.

U.S. President Joe Biden and NATO allies want Russia out of territory it has seized in eastern Ukraine. Ukraine has launched a counteroffensive that has made small gains in driving out Russian forces.

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy last year proposed a 10-point peace plan, which calls on Russia to withdraw all of its troops.

“I think the biggest thing that the U.S. should be doing right now is making peace — getting Russia and Ukraine together and making peace. You can do it,” Trump said. “This is the time to do it, to get the two parties together to force peace.”

As president, Trump developed friendly relations with Putin, who Biden said on Wednesday has “become a bit of pariah around the world” for invading Ukraine.

Trump said Putin had been damaged by an uprising by the Russian mercenary force, the Wagner Group, and its leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, last weekend.

“You could say that he’s (Putin) still there, he’s still strong, but he certainly has been, I would say, somewhat weakened at least in the minds of a lot of people,” he said.

If Putin were no longer in power, however, “you don’t know what the alternative is. It could be better, but it could be far worse,” Trump said.

As for war crimes charges levied against Putin by the International Criminal Court last March, Trump said Putin’s fate should be discussed when the war is over “because right now if you bring that topic up, you’ll never make peace, you’ll never make a settlement.”

Trump was adamantly opposed to China’s spy base on Cuba and said if Beijing refused to accept his 48-hour demand for shutting it down, a Trump administration would impose new tariffs on Chinese goods.

As president, Trump adopted a tougher stance on China while claiming a good relationship with Chinese President Xi Jinping that soured over the coronavirus pandemic.

“I’d give them 48 hours to get out. And if they didn’t get out, I’d charge them a 100% tariff on everything they sell to the United States, and they’d be gone within two days. They’d be gone within one hour,” Trump said.

Trump was mum on whether the United States would support Taiwan militarily if China invaded the self-ruled island that Beijing claims as its own.

“I don’t talk about that. And the reason I don’t is because it would hurt my negotiating position,” he said. “All I can tell you is for four years, there was no threat. And it wouldn’t happen if I were president.” 
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Biden Refutes Top-Down Economic Policy with ‘Bidenomics’

Here comes “Bidenomics,” President Joe Biden’s self-named plan to forge an economic future “for families and communities that have long been written off and left behind.” On Wednesday, he visited Chicago — a legendary city in the nation’s once-booming industrial and agricultural heartland — to introduce Bidenomics to the world. VOA’s Anita Powell reports from Washington. Patsy Widakuswara contributed to this report.
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White House Takes a Bet on ‘Bidenomics’ Amid Americans’ Pessimism on Economy

Ahead of President Joe Biden’s 2024 reelection campaign, the White House is promoting the term “Bidenomics” to make the case that his policies to “grow the economy from the bottom up and the middle out” have succeeded in taming inflation and lowering unemployment.

“The share of working-age Americans in the workforce is higher now than it has been for 15 years,” Lael Brainard, director of the White House National Economic Council, said Tuesday during a news briefing. “While we have more work to do, inflation has been coming down for 11 months in a row.”

She touted 13 million jobs created since Biden took office in February 2021 and an unemployment rate that has remained below 4% since February of this year.

Recent economic indicators give the administration reasons to be hopeful. While inflation still poses a challenge, employers continue to hire, and consumer prices rose at a slower pace in May compared with the previous year.

But so far most Americans do not share the administration’s optimism. The most recent Ipsos poll shows Biden’s approval rating remaining steady in the low 40s. The economy remains a top concern, and most are pessimistic about the direction of the country, a fact that Republicans have been eager to underscore.

“It’s frankly staggering to me that the president continues to have the audacity to say things like ‘hardworking families are reaping the rewards’ of his policies,” Senate Republican Whip John Thune said earlier this month. “Hardworking families are certainly reaping something from the president’s policies, but it isn’t rewards.”

Disconnect from data

The disconnect between economic data and how people are feeling about their financial well-being may be attributed to the fact that Americans are not digesting the good news, said Ipsos spokesperson Chris Jackson. He pointed to surveys measuring Americans’ familiarity with positive economic developments such as low unemployment and falling inflation versus bad news such as supply chain issues and high inflation.

“The bad news, everyone knows about. The good news, very few Americans know about,” he told VOA. “In an environment like that, it’s hard to make a compelling case that you’re doing a good job, when nobody knows anything that’s good.”

The administration is aware of the disconnect. On Wednesday, Biden will be in Chicago to deliver a speech explaining Bidenomics and trying to convince Americans that the economy is thriving under his leadership.

The speech is part of a three-week push in which top officials will travel across the country to argue that legislation championed by the president is delivering results for Americans. This includes massive investments under the infrastructure law, the COVID-19 relief package and the CHIPS and Science Act that injects over $52 billion in semiconductor research, development, manufacturing and workforce development.

Republicans believe some of the administration’s policies are too costly and contribute to high inflation. They say that most of the job gains since 2021 were simply jobs that were being recovered from the pandemic, not new job creation.

Still, the decision to brand the country’s fortunes with the president’s name reflects the administration’s confidence that the trajectory is upward, and the economy will not fall into recession – at least before November 2024 when the presidential election will be held.

Last week, the Federal Reserve paused its aggressive rate hike campaign for the first time in 18 months but signaled that the battle against inflation isn’t over. More interest rate hikes are likely, even as early as July.

Move over, Reaganomics

Bidenomics is also an attempt to distinguish the president’s and the Democrats’ agenda from that of Republicans who favor cutting taxes and slashing government spending.

Biden and his aides have often criticized former Republican President Ronald Reagan’s agenda of lowering tax rates, deregulation and slashing spending on government programs. Since the push for Reaganomics in the 1980s, Republicans have credited low taxes with boosting corporate profits and ultimately all workers and the population in general.

“He rejected trickle-down economics, the theory that tax cuts at the top would trickle down, that all we needed was for government to get out of the way,” said Brainard, the director of Biden’s economic council.

“That failed approach led to a pullback of private investment from key industries, like semiconductors to solar. It led to a deterioration of the nation’s infrastructure. And it led to a loss of a path to the middle class for too many Americans and too many communities around the country.”

Brainard said that in Chicago, the president will outline the main pillars of Bidenomics, including strategic investments in critical sectors such as infrastructure, clean energy and semiconductors; empowering and educating American workers, particularly those who have been previously marginalized; and promoting competition to lower costs and provide fair opportunities for small businesses.

Just two weeks ago, Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives unveiled a proposed series of new tax breaks aimed at businesses and families, a proposal that would reverse some of Biden’s legislative victories.

Katherine Gypson contributed to this report.
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FBI, Homeland Security Ignored ‘Massive Amount’ of Intelligence Before Jan. 6, Senate Report Says

The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security downplayed or ignored “a massive amount of intelligence information” ahead of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S Capitol, according to the chairman of a Senate panel that on Tuesday released a new report on the intelligence failures ahead of the insurrection. 

The report details how the agencies failed to recognize and warn of the potential for violence as some of then-President Donald Trump’s supporters openly planned the siege in messages and forums online. 

Among the multitude of intelligence that was overlooked was a December 2020 tip to the FBI that members of the far-right extremist group Proud Boys planned to be in Washington, D.C., for the certification of Joe Biden’s victory and their “plan is to literally kill people,” the report said.

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee said the agencies were also aware of many social media posts that foreshadowed violence, some calling on Trump’s supporters to “come armed” and storm the Capitol, kill lawmakers or “burn the place to the ground.” 

Michigan Senator Gary Peters, the Democratic chairman of the Homeland panel, said the breakdown was “largely a failure of imagination to see threats that the Capitol could be breached as credible,” echoing the findings of the Sept. 11 commission about intelligence failures ahead of the 2001 terrorist attacks. 

The report by the panel’s majority staff says the intelligence community has not entirely recalibrated to focus on the threats of domestic, rather than international, terrorism. And government intelligence leaders failed to sound the alarm “in part because they could not conceive that the U.S. Capitol Building would be overrun by rioters.” 

Still, Peters said, the reasons for dismissing what he called a “massive” amount of intelligence “defies an easy explanation.” 

‘Everybody failed’

While several other reports have examined the intelligence failures around Jan. 6 — including a bipartisan 2021 Senate report, the House Jan. 6 committee last year and several separate internal assessments by the Capitol Police and other government agencies — the latest investigation is the first congressional report to focus solely on the actions of the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis. 

In the wake of the attack, Peters said the committee interviewed officials at both agencies and found what was “pretty constant finger-pointing” at each other. 

“Everybody should be accountable because everybody failed,” Peters said. 

Using emails and interviews collected by the Senate committee and others, including from the House Jan. 6 panel, the report lays out in detail the intelligence the agencies received in the weeks ahead of the attack. 

There was not a failure to obtain evidence, the report says, but the agencies “failed to fully and accurately assess the severity of the threat identified by that intelligence, and formally disseminate guidance to their law enforcement partners.” 

As Trump, a Republican, falsely claimed he had won the 2020 election and tried to overturn his election defeat, telling his supporters to “fight like hell” in a speech in front of the White House that day, thousands of them marched to the Capitol. More than 2,000 rioters overran law enforcement, assaulted police officers, and caused more than $2.7 billion in damage to the Capitol, according to a U.S. Government Accountability Office report earlier this year. 

Breaking through windows and doors, the rioters sent lawmakers running for their lives and temporarily interrupted the certification of the election victory by Biden, a Democrat. 

Even as the attack was happening, the new report found, the FBI and Homeland Security downplayed the threat. As the Capitol Police struggled to clear the building, Homeland Security “was still struggling to assess the credibility of threats against the Capitol and to report out its intelligence.” 

And at a 10 a.m. briefing — as protesters gathered at Trump’s speech and near the Capitol were “wearing ballistic helmets, body armor, carrying radio equipment and military grade backpacks” — the FBI briefed that there were “no credible threats at this time.” 

The lack of sufficient warnings meant that law enforcement were not adequately prepared and there was not a hardened perimeter established around the Capitol, as there is during events such as the annual State of the Union address. 

The report contains dozens of tips about violence on Jan. 6 that the agencies received and dismissed either due to lack of coordination, bureaucratic delays, or trepidation on the part of those who were collecting it. The FBI, for example, was unexpectedly hindered in its attempt to find social media posts planning for Jan. 6 protests when the contract for its third-party social media monitoring tool expired. At Homeland Security, analysts were hesitant to report open-source intelligence after criticism in 2020 for collecting intelligence on American citizens during racial justice demonstrations. 

One tip received by the FBI ahead of the Jan. 6 attack was from a former Justice Department official who sent screenshots of online posts from members of the Oath Keepers extremist group: “There is only one way in. It is not signs. It’s not rallies. It’s … bullets!” 

The social media company Parler, a favored platform for Trump’s supporters, directly sent the FBI several posts it found alarming, adding that there was “more where this came from” and that they were concerned about what would happen on Jan. 6. 

“(T)his is not a rally and it’s no longer a protest,” read one of the Parler posts sent to the FBI, according to the report. “This is a final stand where we are drawing the red line at Capitol Hill. … don’t be surprised if we take the #capital [sic] building.” 

‘Determined to aggressively fight’

But even as it received the warnings, the Senate panel found, the agency said over and over again that there were no credible threats. 

“Our nation is still reckoning with the fallout from January 6th, but what is clear is the need for a reevaluation of the federal government’s domestic intelligence collection, analysis, and dissemination processes,” the new report says. 

In a statement, Homeland Security spokesperson Angelo Fernandez said that the department has made many of those changes two and a half years later. The department “has strengthened intelligence analysis, information sharing, and operational preparedness to help prevent acts of violence and keep our communities safe.” 

The FBI said in a separate response that since the attack it has increased focus on “swift information sharing” and centralized the flow of information to ensure more timely notification to other entities. “The FBI is determined to aggressively fight the danger posed by all domestic violent extremists, regardless of their motivations,” the statement said. 

FBI Director Christopher Wray has defended the FBI’s handling of intelligence in the run-up to Jan. 6, including a report from its Norfolk field office on Jan. 5 that cited online posts foreshadowing the possibility of a “war” in Washington the following day. The Senate report noted that the memo “did not note the multitude of other warnings” the agency had received. 

The faultfinding with the FBI and Homeland Security Department echoes the blistering criticism directed at U.S. Capitol Police in a bipartisan report issued by the Senate Homeland and Rules committees two years ago. That report found that the police intelligence unit knew about social media posts calling for violence, as well, but did not inform top leadership what they had found. 

Peters says he asked for the probe of the intelligence agencies after other reports, such as the House panel’s investigation last year, focused on other aspects of the attack. The Jan. 6 panel was more focused on Trump’s actions and concluded in its report that the former president criminally engaged in a “multi-part conspiracy” to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 presidential election and failed to act to stop his supporters from attacking the Capitol. 

“It’s important for us to realize these failures to make sure it doesn’t happen again,” Peters said. 
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