Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s indictment of 12 Russian intelligence officers in the hacking of Democrats during the 2016 presidential election came out at a beneficial moment for President Donald Trump, The Wall Street Journal’s Gerald Seib told CBS News’ “Face the Nation” Sunday.
“It means that he has a reason to raise this with Vladimir Putin,” Seib told CBS’ Margaret Brennan. “I think it would have been much worse for the president if he had had this meeting and said some conciliatory things about how I don't think the Russians really did this and then the indictment had come out later. That would have looked terrible. It would have looked as if he has been sandbagged.
“As it is now, he has no recourse except to raise it. And Vladimir Putin knows that it's going to be raised,” he said, referring to Trump’s upcoming summit with Putin. “I think it will be fascinating, as you suggested earlier, what's this going to be like at a press conference tomorrow where they're both standing up side by side and this is going to be Topic A on the list. I don't know how that's going to go. But I don't think it's bad for the president that this is out there because it's clear he has to raise it.”
Mueller’s charges came down Friday. The indictment was the clearest allegation yet of Russian efforts to meddle in American politics, and lay out a sweeping and coordinated effort to break into key Democratic email accounts.
Trump and Putin are to hold talks Monday in Finland, a sit-down mostly sought after by Trump. The president on Friday said he wasn’t going into the meeting with high expectations.
"We do have a — a political problem where — you know in the United States we have this stupidity going on. Pure stupidity," he said, referring to Mueller's probe. "But it makes it very hard to do something with Russia. Anything you do, it's always going to be, 'Oh, Russia, he loves Russia.'"
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