Toomey: Syria Action Proves Trump Not Close To Russia
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) - Pennsylvania's Republican Senator Pat Toomey reviewed the accusations of Donald Trump's ties to Russia and their potential collusion to aid in his electoral victory over Hillary Clinton. He tells Chris Stigall on Talk Radio 1210 WPHT that Trump's military action against Syria, a close ally of Russia, blows a significant hole in that premise.
"I think President Trump put a huge dent in that theory last week. The other subplot in that narrative is that, somehow, Putin and company have something on Trump that they can blackmail him with. Well, he is behaving rather oddly for a guy who is afraid of being blackmailed. That sounds a little ridiculous."
Toomey insisted that no matter what happened, the Senate will get to the bottom of it.
"We have an intelligence committee, a Senate committee, that's bipartisan and they're conducting an investigation and it's got three parts. One part is what exactly were the Russians up to? What were they doing to try to interfere with our election, discredit our political process? There's no question they were up to no good and we should get to the bottom of exactly what they did and how the did it. Second question is was there collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians or was there not? They're investigating that. I'm confident they'll get an answer. The third thing is every bit as important to me, which is what was going on with spying on Americans? We know that was happening. The other two, there's a lot of questions but we know for a fact that there were American intelligence agencies spying on Americans and committing the felony of releasing that information, through leaks, to the public."
To him, the biggest story remains the allegations that Barack Obama's National Security Adviser, Susan Rice, unmasked the names of Americans electronically monitored by the intelligence community.
"We know for a fact that she ordered that the identity of Americans who were, somehow, caught up, we don't know exactly how, somehow caught up in surveillance, she insisted on their identities being revealed, which is extremely unusual. Now, she has the legal authority to do that in the position she was in, but ok, I'd like to know why she did that? Why was it so important to the security of America that she have the name of American Citizen A or American Citizen B? Which is the way that the privacy laws require that the intelligence services protect the identity of Americans who were caught up in this. We don't know that yet. What we do know is that she's been dishonest about it. First saying she had no idea and then it turns out, no, actually she's the one who ordered that the identity be exposed."