The top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee blasted President Donald Trump for wanting to give Russia’s Vladimir Putin the “red carpet treatment” with a White House invitation rather than challenging him.
In an interview on “Fox News Sunday,” Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., said the invite is “beyond comprehension.”
“You can speak to adversaries, but at the end of the day, you have to do it in a way in which you challenge them,” he said. “The president seems to want to be chummy with Putin instead of challenging him.”
“We are going to give him, you know, a red carpet treatment and invite him to Washington,” Menendez added.
According to Menendez, Trump should be challenging Putin “about violating international law… about the massacre that’s taking place in Syria… about the annexation of Crimea, and say, ‘we will never recognize the annexation of Crimea.’”
Menendez praised Fox News anchor Chris Wallace’s handling of an interview with Putin, and offered the comments he would have wanted Trump to say to Putin in their closed-door meeting in Helsinki, Finland.
“I would have liked him to have said, ‘look, President Putin, we know that you interfered in our 2016 elections and that you are doing it now and that's not a question, that's a statement and here are consequences to it,”’ he said. “‘If you want to rejoin the world order and observe international law and stop invading sovereign nations like Ukraine, then we can have a pathway forward.’
“‘But at the end of the day, there will be real consequences and I’m glad that we’re talking, but there are real consequences to your constant engagement in our elections that undermine our democracy.’”
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