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Among Donald Trump's cabinet members, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has thus far dominated the pr*sident's time. By Politico's count last month, Tillerson had met with Trump 22 times, while Environmental Protection Agency destroyer Scott Pruitt didn't even get a mention in the tally (graphic below).
Pruitt's Oval Office stock may have risen slightly in the run-up to Donald Trump's cynical political ploy to shore up his base by trashing the planet. But what's clear is that Tillerson, who reportedly argued against pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement, didn’t spend much of his early political capital with Trump laying the groundwork to salvage the Paris accord.
How Tillerson and Trump were wiling away those hours became a lot clearer with journalist Michael Isikoff's inside account of the early days at the State Department as Team Trump took over. During that time, former Obama administration holdovers and career diplomats at State waged an all-hands-on-deck battle to beat back Trump officials' efforts to ease Russia’s sanctions.
Team Trump had immediately set about the task of rolling back sanctions and other punitive measures President Obama put in place after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and later prosecuted an extensive campaign to hack the 2016 election.
“There was serious consideration by the White House to unilaterally rescind the sanctions,” said Dan Fried, a veteran State Department official who served as chief U.S. coordinator for sanctions policy until he retired in late February. He said in the first few weeks of the administration, he received several “panicky” calls from U.S. government officials who told him they had been directed to develop a sanctions-lifting package and imploring him, “Please, my God, can’t you stop this?” [...]
Tom Malinowski, who had just stepped down as President Obama’s assistant secretary of state for human rights, told Yahoo News he too joined the effort to lobby Congress after learning from former colleagues that the administration was developing a plan to lift sanctions — and possibly arrange a summit between Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin — as part of an effort to achieve a “grand bargain” with Moscow. “It would have been a win-win for Moscow,” said Malinowski, who only days before he left office announced his own round of sanctions against senior Russian officials for human rights abuses under a law known as the Magnitsky Act.
"Grand bargain," a term recently used to describe bipartisan negotiations between two Americans from separate branches of government, now more accurately relates to efforts by an American president to align himself and by extension, our nation, with a hostile and corrupt foreign power that plotted to subvert our democracy.
The new insights into the early days in the State Department give a lot of context to all the quality time Rex Tillerson—arguably Trump's most Russia-connected cabinet member—has spent in the Oval Office.
It also explains why Tillerson’s State Department went through two unusually swift early purges. The second in mid-February cleared out most of the seventh-floor staff—the nerve center of regional expertise—reportedly signaling that foreign policy portfolios would now be controlled “directly by the White House” rather than professional diplomats. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, for example, was notably attending key meetings with heads of state like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu without a single State Department official present. At the same time, Trump’s new seventh-floor occupants were issuing orders to ease sanctions mere "days" after the inauguration.
Just days after President Trump took office, officials who had moved into the secretary of state’s seventh-floor office sent a “tasking” order to the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs to develop a menu of options to improve relations with Russia...
Fried, a 40-year State Department veteran, was not a victim of that purge, but he chose to retire in early March. Amid the turmoil engulfing the department's shifting priorities, Fried gave a rousing farewell speech to his colleagues and in a subsequent interview cautioned Trump:
“Don’t be so desperate to rub up against a Russia which is busy trying to do us in all over the world.”
Ultimately, the Trump administration’s rush to lift sanctions hit a wall amid revelations in February that Michael Flynn had discussed the matter with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in late December, at the very moment President Obama was announcing punitive measures for Russia's election meddling.
But the Trump administration's early fervor to normalize relations with the Kremlin in exchange for exactly nothing we can tangibly see adds another level of intrigue to the December contacts that both Flynn and Kushner had with the Russians.
Kushner not only joined Flynn in an early December meeting with Kislyak, he also met with the head of a sanctioned Russian state-run bank, Surgey Gorkov, a Putin ally. Kushner's explanation for that meeting is now at odds with Gorkov's and neither is particularly satisfying. If they met in a diplomatic capacity, as Kushner claims, Gorkov could have lobbied him to lift the U.S.-imposed sanctions on his bank. But if Kushner was there as head of his family's real estate business, as Gorkov asserts, he could have been leveraging his soon-to-be position in the Trump White House to the benefit of his company.
Or, it was all one and the same. Kushner could have been looking for easy money for his company from a bank that just happened to need liberation from U.S. sanctions that Kushner would soon be in a position to lift. That's exactly the type of deal the FBI is exploring, Reuters reported last week:
FBI investigators are examining whether Russians suggested to Kushner or other Trump aides that relaxing economic sanctions would allow Russian banks to offer financing to people with ties to Trump, said the current U.S. law enforcement official.
One way or the other, a month later, the Trump administration was working quickly on a sweeping deal to free up Russia from the burden of those sanctions.
Trump made a bet this week that pitting Pittsburgh against Paris was just the juice he needed to keep his base believing. That gamble also drew at least 24 hours of blistering headlines from around the globe that had nothing to do with Russia, never mind ceding America's leadership on the world stage and endangering the planet.
It was exactly the type of self-centered transactional move Trump specializes in because the enormity of something like world order and global warming is lost on the pinhead of a narcissist. But that same transactional mentality, wielded by one-time private citizens turned government power brokers in service of themselves, might well be Trump’s undoing.
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