Fox News’s Chris Wallace gives Putin the grilling Trump won’t
www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2018/07/16/fox-newss-chris-wallace-gives-putin-the-grilling-trump-wont/?utm_term=.0cf08053bf30
President Trump refuses to press Vladimir Putin on the questions pretty much every official in American government thinks he should. Luckily, there’s Fox News's Chris Wallace.
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Perhaps the most notable exchange came toward the end, when Wallace probed Putin on why many of his critics wind up dead or near death. The most recent high-profile example of this is Sergei Skripal in Britain, an attack for which the Trump administration officially holds Russia responsible but Trump himself seems to view as an obstacle to making friends.
Putin, rather remarkably, compared these alleged assassinations to the assassinations of Americans such as President John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s.
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At another tense point early in the interview, Wallace produced a copy of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s indictments of 12 Russian military intelligence officers from Friday. He detailed it briefly, and Putin began smirking — which Wallace noted. Then Wallace offered it to Putin, and Putin froze for a moment. Rather than accept the documents, he told Wallace to set them on the small table between them.
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Wallace also pressed Putin on the idea that he had compromising information on Trump — which Putin, unlike in the news conference earlier Monday, flatly denied — and a video the Russian government released rather clearly appearing to show a nuclear missile striking Florida. Some have posited that it showed the missile striking near Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort.
Putin tried to pretend it wasn’t a provocation — and rather ridiculously that it wasn’t even Florida
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It was the grilling you’d expect Trump to have given. It was all the questions Russian journalists can’t ask. And it was a marked contrast to earlier in the day