President Donald Trump Tuesday night signaled his reluctance to enforce congressionally-passed restrictions on Russia.
In signing the massive annual military spending bill, known formally as the National Defense Authorization Act, Trump objected to several measures Congress passed to toughen U.S. policy toward Russia, which U.S. intelligence has assessed interfered in the 2016 election to benefit him.
Several provisions of the bill, Trump wrote in his signing statement — effectively a presidential caveat to new laws – could “potentially dictate the position of the United States in external military and foreign affairs and, in certain instances, direct the conduct of international diplomacy.”
It’s the latest installment in a pattern in which Trump carves out an exception to his typical bellicosity for Russia, even as he describes a federal investigation aimed at uncovering his campaign’s ties to the Kremlin as a politicized fraud.
Among those provisions Trump cited as potentially violative of his authority is section 1239, which directs Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and the military to “develop and implement a comprehensive strategy to counter threats by the Russian Federation.”
Subsection A of the requirement, to which Trump also specifically objected, directs the strategy to attribute and defend against “hybrid warfare operations short of traditional armed conflict against the United States and its allies and partners.” In particular, such a strategy should “identify and defend against” Russia’s “use of misinformation, disinformation and propaganda in social and traditional media” – something The Daily Beast, as well as the congressional Russia inquiries, have extensively documented.
The strategy Congress directed also seeks action against “corrupt or illicit financing of political parties, think tanks, media organizations and academic institutions” and “the use of coercive economic tools, including sanctions, market access, cryptocurrencies, and differential pricing, especially in the energy section.” It explicitly seeks unnamed measures to bolster early detection of “hybrid warfare operations by the Russian federation” and to support actions “to support NATO allies and non-NATO partners” – like those in Eastern Europe concerned about Russian irredentism, as seen in Ukraine – “in maintaining their sovereignty and territorial integrity.”
