Then-President Donald Trump sent a "fawning" thank you note to Vladmir Putin after the Russian president's agents orchestrated the poisoning of a double agent and his daughter, a new book reportedly reveals.
Trump's former national security adviser HR McMaster details this bizarre moment in his upcoming book "At War With Ourselves" about Putin's exploitation of the former president's "ego and insecurities," the Guardian reported Wednesday.
McMaster, fired in April 2018, recounts the former president's strange response to news that Putin's agents had critically hurt former Russian intelligence office Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in a U.K. poisoning plot the month before.
"While other western leaders were beginning to formulate a strong response to the assassination attempt, McMaster says, Trump sat in the White House fawning over a New York Post article with the headline: Putin heaps praise on Trump, pans US politics," the Guardian reports.
"Trump, according to the book, wrote an appreciative note on the article with a black Sharpie and asked McMaster 'to get the clipping to Putin.'"
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McMaster delivered Trump's private message to the White House office of the staff secretary despite deep misgivings about how it might be used, the Guardian reported.
Not only was McMaster worried Putin would try to "embarrass" Trump, he feared the note would "provide cover for the attack," according to the Guardian.
“Later, as evidence mounted that the Kremlin, and very likely Putin himself had ordered the nerve agent attack on Skripal," McMaster wrote, "I told them not to send it.”
McMaster also detailed an episode during a July 2017 summit in Germany during which he begged Trump not to be taken in by Putin.
“My basic message...was ‘do not be a chump’,” McMaster wrote. “I could tell that Trump was getting impatient with my ‘negative vibe’. I said what I needed to say. If he was going to be contrary, I hoped he would be contrary to the Russian dictator, not to me.”
