The “Russia collusion” conspiracy theory is back, this time in the form of a memoir by former National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, who complains: “I cannot understand Putin’s hold on Trump.”
Once again, the facts are brushed aside: the fact that Putin did not invade anything while Donald Trump was president; the fact that U.S. forces killed hundreds of Russian mercenaries in Syria under Trump; the fact that Trump slapped sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia; and the fact that Trump held Russia in check while being outwardly polite.
McMaster, long seen as a favorite of the late Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and the anti-Trump establishment, is cashing in on the opportunity Trump gave him, writing a memoir timed for election season that revisits the debunked Russia collusion hoax.
Front page of the Wall Street Journal’s “Review” section, August 24-25, 2024 (Joel Pollak / Breitbart News)
In an excerpt published by the Wall Street Journal, McMaster writes about how he disobeyed Trump’s orders, ostensibly to prevent Putin from using Trump to his own advantage:
About two weeks later, on March 4, 2018, former Russian military intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter were poisoned in Salisbury, England, with a banned military-grade nerve agent that was easily traced to Moscow. Russian spy agencies—the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) and the military Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU)—were the perpetrators. The use of a nerve agent had placed hundreds, maybe thousands, of lives at risk. It was with this particularly heinous method that Putin had apparently decided to assassinate Skripal, a former KGB double agent who had been imprisoned for 13 years in Russia but was then released by Moscow in an exchange in July 2010, the biggest spy swap since the Cold War.
Just a few days after the poisoning of Skripal and his daughter, a story appeared in the New York Post with the headline “Putin Heaps Praise on Trump, Pans U.S. Politics.” When I walked into the Oval Office that evening, on another matter, the president had a copy of the article and was writing a note to the Russian leader across the page with a fat black Sharpie. He asked me to get the clipping to Putin. I took it with me. When I got home that night, I confided to my wife Katie, “After over a year in this job, I cannot understand Putin’s hold on Trump.”
News was breaking about the poisoning in England, and I was certain that Putin would use Trump’s annotated clipping to embarrass him and provide cover for the attack. The next morning, I stuck to procedures and gave the clipping to the White House Office of the Staff Secretary, which manages any paper coming into and out of the Oval Office. I asked them to take their time clearing it and to come back to me before sending it to Putin via his embassy in Washington. Later, as evidence mounted that the Kremlin and, very likely, Putin himself had ordered the nerve agent attack on Skripal, I told them not to send it.
The book is called At War with Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House.
McMaster waited more than six years after his firing to release it, right before the 2024 election.
As late as 2022, 72% of Democrats still believed that Russia was responsible for Trump’s victory in 2016. Special Counsel Robert Mueller, armed with a phalanx of left-wing prosecutors and tens of millions of dollars, could find no evidence that Trump, or any other American, had colluded with Russia.
Numerous speakers at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last week referred to the idea that Trump was controlled by Putin. Vice President Kamala Harris, the party nominee, claimed that Trump “encouraged Putin to invade our allies.”
That false claim refers to a remark made by Trump about NATO countries that did not pay their agreed-upon dues for mutual defense. He claimed he told a foreign leader: “’No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want. You got to pay. You got to pay your bills.’ And the money came flowing in.”
