(CNN) — When President Donald Trump launched the Iran war, one of his chief goals was to stop Tehran from funding proxy groups in the Middle East. Those proxy groups, he noted, were responsible for wounding and killing scores of US troops.
When it comes to whether Russia is helping Iran target those Americans, though, Trump seems remarkably incurious.
And that’s become a pretty familiar posture for him.
The most recent example stems from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s testimony before a Senate committee last week.
When asked whether China and Russia were helping Iran, Hegseth cited “ways in which both of those countries” have been “enabling some of the things Iran is doing, yes.”
Two days later, Secretary of State Marco Rubio ignored a question about the subject while seated across from Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.
Then Trump issued a social media post contradicting Hegseth. He said China and Russia were “in my opinion, not participating” in the Iran war because their leaders had assured him they weren’t selling weapons to Tehran.
“I think, you know, I trust them,” Trump said later in the day, adding: “There could be some things they do. But, thus far, at least, it has not been major. I don’t think they’d want to have me disappointed.”
But Russia isn’t just accused of potentially arming Iran; Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said Moscow has given Iran satellite imagery of US bases.
When asked about this Monday, Trump again downplayed how much it mattered — saying it would have been “unimpactful” — but added, “We’ll find out if that’s true. I’ll ask (Russian President Vladimir) Putin about it.”
But it’s not like this is a new story for him to suddenly broach with Putin. CNN’s first story on this dates back nearly five months, to early March, when it first reported that Russia was providing intel on US military targets to Iran, according to multiple sources familiar with US intelligence.
(The New York Times has reported since then that US and European officials also believed Moscow was providing drones and drone parts to Iran, which the Kremlin denied.)
The president greeted CNN’s March reporting much like the news today. He said he had “had no indication of that whatsoever” but that the results in the war’s early days suggested it didn’t matter much.
“Whether or not this happened, frankly, it does not really matter,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt added, “because President Trump and the United States military are absolutely decimating the rogue Iranian terrorist regime.”
One of Trump’s negotiators to end the Russia-Ukraine war, Steve Witkoff, said he had “strongly” told Russia not to give Iran targeting information and other aid. But Trump never came out and said it so firmly.
And even after additional US deaths at the hands of Iran this month, the subject apparently still doesn’t concern him too much.
All of it sounds a lot like Trump’s first term, when there was also intelligence linking Russia to the targeting of US troops. Back then, it was Russia possibly placing bounties on those troops in Afghanistan.
As of mid-2020, Trump denied he had been orally briefed on it. But CNN and others reported it had been in his daily briefing in February 2020 (which he is not known to fully read) and that the White House had received intelligence about the possibility as far back as early 2019.
Trump knocked the story as possibly a “hoax” and “fake news” and, weeks after it was reported, said he had declined to bring it up during a call with Putin.
“I have never discussed it with Putin,” Trump told Axios at the time. “I would, I have no problem with it.”
The Trump administration emphasized that the intelligence wasn’t conclusive, and the Biden administration said by 2021 that the CIA had only “low to moderate confidence” in it. But that still leaves open the possibility. And given it involves the lives of US troops, it would seem to be something a president might be pretty interested in.
Trump, though, has done what he often does — draw an apparent moral equivalency to what the US does. During his first term, he likened the possibility of Russia placing bounties on US troops to the United States aiding anti-Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s. And back in March, he said that Russia would “say we do it against them, wouldn’t they?”
The problem with this posture is not just that it places the United States on similar moral ground to Russia; it’s that it sends a message to Russia that helping Iran target US troops — if that indeed is happening — isn’t a red line for Trump.
The-CNN-Wire
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