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Donald Trump wrote a flattering note to Vladimir Putin after an ex-Russian intelligence officer and his daughter were poisoned by a deadly nerve agent in the UK in 2018, a former Trump advisor wrote in his upcoming memoir.
Former National Security Advisor HR McMaster detailed Trump’s relationship with the Russian President during his year-plus stint in the post in his book At War With Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House, obtained by The Guardian. The book’s release date is August 27.
Sergei Skripal, a British citizen and former Russian intelligence officer, and his daughter Yulia, were exposed to novichok, a lethal nerve agent, in Salisbury, England in March 2018. The pair were hospitalized for weeks but ultimately survived.
Three days after the attack, as world leaders in the west scrambled to respond to the near-death incident, Trump sat in the White House admiring a March 7 article in the New York Post titled “Putin heaps praise on Trump, pans US politics,” the now-retired general wrote.
The then-president grabbed a black sharpie to pen an “appreciative note” on the article, the Guardian reported. Trump then asked McMaster “to get the clipping to Putin.”
“I was certain that Putin would use Trump’s annotated clipping to embarrass him and provide cover for the attack,” the former national security advisor wrote in his memoir.
McMaster recalled giving the note to the White House office of the staff secretary: “Later, as evidence mounted that the Kremlin, and very likely Putin himself had ordered the nerve agent attack on Skripal, I told them not to send it.”
The praise captured by the Post article was part of an effort by Putin to alienate Trump from his advisors who urged him to take a tougher approach to the Kremlin, McMaster reportedly wrote.
“Putin, a ruthless former KGB operator, played to Trump’s ego and insecurities with flattery,” McMaster noted.
The note at the time of the nerve agent attack is far from the first time Trump has expressed admiration for Putin. He hailed the autocratic leader as a “genius,” called him “savvy,” and even sided with him over US intelligence, disregarding their assessment of Russian interference in the 2016 election. The then-president said at a joint press conference alongside Putin in July 2018: “I have great confidence in my intelligence people, but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today.”
It didn’t take long for laboratories around the world to conclude that the attack against Skripal was conducted by Russians. German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas in April 2018 said in stark terms: “There is no plausible alternative explanation.” Police in the UK determined that Skripal had been “targeted specifically.”
Reports later indicated that Trump had privately doubted Russia’s role in the poisoning incident.
While speaking to then-Prime Minister Theresa May months after the attack, Trump “disputed her intelligence community’s conclusion that Putin’s government had orchestrated the attempted murder” of Skripal, the Washington Post reported in October 2019.
Police in the UK also connected the March 2018 attack to another poisoning in June, when British national Dawn Sturgess and her partner were exposed to Novichok in nearby Amesbury, England after coming into contact with a perfume bottle contaminated with novichok. She died the following month. Two Russian intelligence officers were charged in absentia with conspiracy to murder, attempted murder and use of the novichok nerve agent.
It was the second high-profile poisoning of a Russian defector in Britain to be blamed on Putin. In November 2006 former FSB agent and whistleblower Alexander Litvinenko died weeks after being poisoned with polonium-210, a radioactive isotope smuggled into the UK by two Russians who then met with Litvinenko at a London hotel and apparently put the poison in his tea.
“After over a year in this job, I cannot understand Putin’s hold on Trump,” McMaster is quoted as saying. Weeks after the nerve agent attack, Trump announced that he was fired by tweet but praised him for doing an “outstanding job” and reassured that he would always consider McMaster “a friend.”
