FROM EIR DAILY ALERT
Jatras Charges Enemies of Trump Push Sanctions To Derail Senator Paul’s Russia Mission
Aug. 10 , 2018 (EIRNS)—Retired U.S. State Department official Jim Jatras charged that the enemies of President Donald Trump helped launch new sanctions against Russia to undermine U.S. Sen. Rand Paul’s bid to mend relations during his trip to Russia this week. The Russian Federation Council’s Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Sen. Konstantin Kosachev said yesterday that the new U.S. sanctions will harm bilateral relations, just days after he had accepted Senator Paul’s invitation to send a delegation of fellow lawmakers to Washington. On Aug. 8, Paul said he delivered a letter from Trump to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s administration, regarding the many areas in which the two countries could work together.
“This baseless ‘finding’ by the State Department, with heavy pressure from Congress, appears to be an attempt to blunt any possible progress towards better relations with Moscow stemming from Sen. Rand Paul’s visit and his delivery of Trump’s letter to Putin,”
Jatras told Sputnik Aug. 9. He continued that Trump’s enemies within the bureaucracy—including some of his own appointees—are trying to undermine the President’s overtures to Moscow
“and further erode his executive authority. Besides blocking every possible path to rapprochement with Russia, this is another step to setting Trump up for removal from office,” he said.
Jatras acknowledged that the harsh second set of sanctions that have been announced looked almost certain to be imposed after the November midterm Congressional elections.
“It’s hard to see at this juncture how that will be avoided. Russia will not submit to inspections, which the U.S. is arrogantly demanding, as if she were some pipsqueak country like Libya,”
he said.
“In the absence of capitulating to the U.S. demand, which Russia will not do, legally Trump can waive the sanctions,” Jatras said. “But I believe this is part of the political trap being laid for him.
“If the harsher measures go into effect in November, it is hard to overstate how dangerous that will be. These are the kind of things that countries do just one step from totally breaking diplomatic relations in advance of war,”
he said.
“In a word, this is insanity. What’s perhaps worst is that this political warfare is being conducted with a total disregard for the truth, much less an honest attempt to find it,”
he said. “It’s worse than a presumption of guilt—it’s a positive, unambiguous verdict of guilt.”
