“Putin is a murderer…”
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Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), one of President Donald Trump’s most outspoken critics on the right, posted a Twitter thread on Sunday night listing reasons why the president shouldn’t meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Sasse began the thread by framing the information as what “every American should know” before the Helsinki meeting. He cut right to the chase by calling Putin a “murderer” as his first reason:
2. Putin is a murderer. He has ordered the assassinations of political adversaries and used outlawed chemical weapons to do it. He oversees Russian military units that shot down Malaysian flight 17 and murdered almost 300 civilians.
— Ben Sasse (@BenSasse) July 16,2018
The mention of political assassinations probably refers to people such as former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko. Litvinenko spoke out against Putin and died shortly after from poisoning.
Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 crashed after a missile hit the plane, killing all 298 people on board. An international study concluded that the Russian military fired the missile despite its adamant denial.
Sasse continued by declaring that Putin will attack the U. S. this year just as he has in the past:
4. Putin is an enemy of America. He sees us as his main enemy and is engaged in ongoing attacks on our nation through information warfare and hacking our infrastructure. It’s not just that he messed with our election in 2016; he attacks us regularly, and will again in 2018.
— Ben Sasse (@BenSasse) July 16,2018
The senator also suggested that Trump should look to former President Ronald Reagan as an example. Reagan met with Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1986 to discuss the countries’ nuclear weapons and other arsenals:
7. I don’t think President Trump should be dignifying Putin with this meeting. When Reagan met with Gorbachev, he did so from a position of strength & moral clarity about the evil empire that the Soviet Union was, and w/ a clear purpose to end the Soviet Union’s threat to the US.
— Ben Sasse (@BenSasse) July 16,2018
Sasse’s tweets stated clearly what he hinted at in a statement on Friday, emphasizing his stance against the meeting in Helsinki.
“All patriotic Americans should understand that Putin is not America’s friend, and he is not the President’s buddy,” the statement read. “We should stand united against Putin’s past and planned future attacks against us.”
Brooklynn is a senior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an intern for IJR Blue. In Chapel Hill, she began as a copy editor at the… more
