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US President Donald Trump is now back in the White House after last week's G7 Summit, hailing his first foreign trip as a big success. He faces once more the domestic challenges he left behind, with reports that his son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner had tried to set up a secret communications channel with Russia.
Russia expert Dmitry Babich of Sputnik News Agency says he doesn’t see a problem in setting up a back channel between the two nations, because “in the worst times in Russia-US relations, in Soviet-US relations, there was a back channel.”
The political analyst notes that the hotline of communication between the Kremlin and the White House was established after the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, and was used in 1967 again when there was a threat of war over the Arab-Israel conflict. “It would be terrible if there were no trusted communication channels between Moscow and Washington,” added Babich.
While agreeing that in theory there is nothing wrong with establishing a back channel, Steve Pruitt, a managing partner at Watts Partners, which according to its website is a “leader in the corporate and government affairs industry,” said the issue here is that Kushner’s intentions “are still unknown.”
Back channels of communication are practiced both internationally and domestically, because there are specific events and activities that can’t 'take place in the public eye',” he said.
“So only when the intent was figured out, can there be a fair and balanced judgment of whether or not what Kushner was doing was within the confines of the law,” added Pruitt.
Kushner is reported to have become the focus of the FBI investigation into possible Russian collusion within the Trump campaign. Some see this as a major blow to the Trump administration.
But Bradley Blakeman, a Republican strategist who served on former president George W. Bush's senior staff, said he doesn’t see anything that will jeopardize either Kushner or the White House itself.
“We now have a special counsel appointed, and they need to do their job. The White House will cooperate,” explained Blakeman. “The only crimes that have been committed are by those who leak confidential and classified information to third parties who have no business receiving that information.”
(CGTN)
