The White House and the State Department are at odds over Russian President Vladimir Putin’s offer to allow the U.S. access to Russians accused of election meddling in return for interviews of Americans accused by the Kremlin of unspecified crimes.

Even as the White House said the offer, made by Putin to President Donald Trump at their summit in Helsinki on Monday, was under consideration, the State Department called Russia’s allegations against the Americans “absurd,” suggesting that any questioning of them would not be countenanced by the U.S. The Russian claims against the Americans, including former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, relate to allegations of fraud and corruption.

WATCH: State Department Denounces Russia’s Demand to Interrogate Americans, Trump Does Not

“The overall assertions that have come out of the Russian government are absolutely absurd: the fact that they want to question 11 American citizens and the assertions that the Russian government is making about those American citizens,” spokeswoman Heather Nauert told reporters.

McFaul tweeted Wednesday: “I hope the White House corrects the record and denounces in categorical terms this ridiculous request from Putin. Not doing so creates moral equivalency between a legitimacy US indictment of Russian intelligence officers and a crazy, completely fabricated story invented by Putin.”

Nauert noted that a U.S. federal court had rejected Russia’s charges regarding British businessman and vocal Kremlin critic Bill Browder. She said Russian authorities already know the U.S. position. Browder was a driving force behind a U.S. law targeting Russian officials over human rights abuses.

“We do not stand by those assertions that the Russian government makes,” Nauert said. “The prosecutor general in Russia is well aware that the United States has rejected Russian allegations in this regard. … We continue to urge Russian authorities to work with the U.S. Department of Justice to pursue those in Russia who in fact perpetrated the fraudulent scheme that Russia refers to that targeted not only Mr. Browder, but also his company and … the Russian people as a whole.”

FBI Director Christopher Wray was similarly dismissive. Speaking Wednesday at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado, he said Putin’s offer was “not high on our list of investigative techniques.”

Wray and Nauert’s comments stood in sharp contrast to those of White House press secretary Sarah Sanders, who held open the possibility that what Trump called “an incredible offer” is being weighed.

“The president’s going to meet with his team, and we’ll let you know when we have an announcement on that,” she said, adding that neither Trump nor anyone else in the administration had committed to accepting the offer.
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Lawmakers are losing patience with the Trump administration’s reliance on tariffs to win trade disputes and are talking increasingly about legislative action to protect U.S. jobs.

A senior Republican senator has threatened legislation to curb President Donald Trump’s trade actions, and other senators joined him on Wednesday in promising a complementary bill. Meanwhile, lawmakers are using congressional hearings to put the spotlight on the economic fallout for local farmers and businesses.

The prospects for any votes on trade legislation before the August recess are dim. Still, lawmakers appear to be putting the Trump administration on notice.

Sen. Orrin Hatch, the Republican chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said that if the administration continues “with its misguided and reckless reliance on tariffs,” he’ll push for legislation. He said he’s discussing options with colleagues now.

Hatch has been a critic of the administration’s imposition of tariffs but has so far focused on working behind the scenes to influence the White House. His speech on the Senate floor served as a pointed warning to the administration not to move forward with tariffs on imported vehicles and auto parts on the grounds that they pose a threat to America’s national security.

Sen. Doug Jones, D-Ala., and Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., followed his cue. They said the president’s proposed auto tariffs threaten tens of thousands of jobs in the South, where foreign automakers have invested heavily in recent decades.

They announced on the Senate floor Wednesday that they’ll introduce legislation as soon as next week that would freeze the Commerce Department’s investigation into whether auto imports present a national security threat. The bill would halt the Commerce Department probe while the International Trade Commission conducts a study.

Alexander urged Trump to reconsider his trade policy and “drop the tariffs.”

“These tariffs are dangerous. These tariffs are going to cost us jobs. These tariffs are going to lower our family incomes,” Alexander said.

While Jones and Alexander went to bat for auto manufacturers in their state, lawmakers from farm country sought to highlight concerns that retaliatory tariffs will dry up export markets as consumers in China, Europe and other places look elsewhere to buy soybeans, pork and other farm goods.

“Our farmers and our ranchers are being used as pawns in a trade war that I can guarantee you not one of them asked for,” Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., said on the Senate floor. “This trade war is eliminating access to foreign markets that have taken generations to develop.”

On the House side, a trade subcommittee heard from farm groups directly on Wednesday. The same panel will examine next week the process that U.S. companies must go through to be excluded from the administration’s tariffs on imported steel and aluminum. No witnesses from the administration testified, much to the dismay of Democrats.

Kevin Paap, a corn and soybean farmer from Minnesota, said the tariffs are hitting farmers from all sides, increasing their costs at a time when prices for their products are falling.

“Agriculture is facing the perfect storm: trade uncertainties, decade lows in farm income, agricultural labor shortages and the uncompleted farm bill,” Paap said. “It’s quickly becoming more than we can handle.”

Cass Gebbers, a fruit grower from Washington state, said China this month increased tariff rates to 50 percent for U.S. cherries, apples and pears. He said that customers have canceled orders as a result of the tariffs and that has pushed down prices as a result of the extra product in the domestic market.

If the tariffs remain in place next year, competitors elsewhere in the world “will snatch up these markets as soon as we stumble.”

Behind the scenes, Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., is urging constituents to make their voices heard at the White House. He said they may have better luck convincing Trump than lawmakers.

“He puts a lot more stock in what he sees and hears from his base than he does from elected members in Congress,” Rounds said.

While concern about a trade war is clearly growing on Capitol Hill, many Republican lawmakers are still giving Trump the benefit of the doubt, hoping the tariffs will lead trading partners, particularly China, to make concessions.

“I think what he had to do is get their attention, particularly China,” said Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga., adding that tariffs did just that.

Rep. Mark Walker of North Carolina, chairman of the Republican Study Committee, the largest GOP caucus in the House, said members have been talking about the tariffs at all their recent meetings but are admittedly “slow-walking” the issue.

“The majority is wanting to kind of wait and give President Trump time to see if he can seal the deal,” Walker said.”But, yeah, there are some concerns, and it seems to be growing with each passing week.”

As lawmakers deal with the series of tariffs announced in recent months, the Trump administration opened another front on that issue Wednesday with the Department of Commerce initiating an investigation into whether imports of foreign uranium, especially from Russia and nations under its influence, are a national security risk. Uranium is used in producing fuel for the nation’s nuclear power plants.
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China bolstered ties with the European Union this week with more large markets in the pipeline to keep its exports healthy as the United States levies import tariffs, analysts say.

 

At the 20th China-EU leaders’ meeting Monday in Beijing, Chinese President Xi Jinping said his country stands ready to promote bilateral economic development. Premier Li Keqiang noted at the summit China had recently cut import tariffs on autos, medicine and consumer goods from the EU.

 

The 28-member European Union, including some of the world’s wealthiest countries, received $437 billion in exports with China last year, which accounted for 20 percent of the bloc’s total shipments from overseas.

 

Officials in Beijing have also pledged to ease trade friction with India this year.

 

“The EU is the second largest trading partner to China,” said Felix Yang, an analyst with the financial advisory firm Kapronasia in Shanghai. “While Trump’s tariffs hit the prospects of the Chinese economy, the EU is becoming a more important market for China.”

 

A reserve in case of trade war

 

China and the United States have headed toward what economists call a “trade war” for much of the year. U.S. President Donald Trump believes China trades unfairly, giving it a $375 billion trade surplus in 2017.

 

This month Trump approved import tariffs of 25 percent on more than 800 Chinese products. The taxes, already in effect, hit Chinese goods worth about $34 billion. Trump has threatened tariffs on goods worth another $450 billion, and China’s commerce ministry said it would make a “necessary counterattack.”

China counts the United States as its No. 1 trading partner, but major markets such as the EU, India and Southeast Asia are high on the list. The summit on Monday with EU leaders should help China solidify EU trade, economists say.

 

“You have to explore opportunities to grow your next largest set of trading partners, and this is where it’s really all about,” said Song Seng Wun, an economist with the private banking unit of CIMB in Singapore. “In case the trade fight with the U.S. were to escalate, it’s good your trading relationship with your remaining partners can improve and hopefully over time pick up some of the slack.”

 

China will need Europe to buy technology that the United States might sell if relations were better, said Liang Kuo-yuan, president of Taipei-based think tank Polaris Research Institute. The threat of a trade war now “slows” China’s acquisition of tech for R&D, he said.

 

“If they can’t develop their own, they would still look for Western technology,” Liang said. “At that point, the EU becomes a major source. If the route to Europe hasn’t been blocked, then the slowdown wouldn’t be so slow.”

 

The European Union will avoid a trade war, European Council President Donald Tusk said after the summit. But the bloc that has its own trade deficit with China advocates new global trade rules and World Trade Organization reforms.

 

Europe, like the United States, worries about China’s protection of technology and other intellectual property rights. In April the EU brought a case to the World Trade Organization against Chinese legislation that it said “undermines the intellectual property rights” of European companies.

The EU wants to “bravely and responsibly reform the rules-based international order,” Tusk was quoted saying on the EU’s website. “This is why I am calling on our Chinese hosts… to jointly start this process from a reform of the WTO.”

 

China voiced support for the WTO reforms at the Monday summit, the European side said in a statement.

 

India and Southeast Asia

 

China’s commerce minister said in April his country would keep working with India to ease trade differences caused by market access issues — resulting in a deficit for India.

Southeast Asia might be next for lighter treatment, Song said. China and the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations are finishing talks on a 16-nation Regional Cooperation Economic Framework, a trade pact that some see as an antidote to the Trans Pacific Partnership deal that Trump exited in 2017.

 

Eventually other countries may join China in facing the United States as many expect trade problems, said Zhao Xijun, associate dean of the School of Finance at Renmin University of China. A tariff battle with China could spill into other parts of Asia, and Trump has rattled other countries with an “America First” policy that’s often regarded abroad as protectionist.

 

China’s trade ties with Japan, South Korea, India and Southeast Asia will “continuously be promoted,” Zhao said. Those countries link to the same supply chain with its own “rules” that cannot be broken by a single country, he said.

 

“It’s not such a simple matter,” Zhao said. “The supply chain has its own rules. It’s not something the American government can break because it says it wants to break it.”
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The European Union’s antitrust regulator fined Google a record $5 billion Wednesday for illegally exploiting the powerful market share position of its Android smartphone system.

The EU antitrust regulator concluded that Google, whose Android system operates more than 80 percent of the world’s smartphones, abused its dominant position to promote its own apps and services, especially the company’s search engine.

The regulator ordered Google to end the illegal practices within 90 days or face more penalties. Google can appeal the decision.

The decision was made Wednesday in a meeting in Brussels.

 
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As grids of lights flash red and sirens wail, teams of cyber-defense specialists snap into action as power networks and water-purification plants come under attack. They are the best in their field – and in this exercise, they are competing against one another.

Operation Locked Shields, a so-called live-fire cyber exercise, is hosted annually by NATO’s Cooperative Cyber Defense Center of Excellence or CCDCOE in Estonia, is aimed at testing members’ and allies’ abilities to see off the latest hacks, malware and cyber interference.

“It is about friendly competition. But what makes it the world’s biggest is first of all the number of nations who are contributing to it. We then bring the ‘crème de la crème’ of all nations together to match each other and also learn to cooperate with each other,” said Siim Alatalu, a senior researcher at the center.

Estonia was the one of the first countries to suffer a large-scale cyber-attack back in 2007 – and most experts say Russia was the culprit. The Baltic country is now at the forefront of NATO’s cyber-security efforts. In a sign of its growing global reputation, Japan has just joined the CCDCOE, hoping to glean valuable skills and information to help defend the upcoming 2020 Olympic Games from cyber-attacks.

While Operation Locked Shields is a practice run, the threat is very real, says Alatalu. “Everything is technology dependent. And therefore everything could be hacked.”

In the winters of 2015 and 2016, Ukraine suffered hacking attacks on its power network, shutting down systems for several hours. Kyiv blamed Russia – a charge Moscow denied.

As well as hacking, governments face the growing problem of disinformation: using the web to disrupt democracies. Analyst Ben Nimmo of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab spoke to VOA at last week’s NATO summit.

“If you look at the Russian interference operation in the U.S., as far as we know it started in April 2014 and it was still going in October 2017 when it shut down,” said Nimmo. “So they’ve had a three-and-a-half-year operation running, which included a reported 100 people, several thousand accounts on social media, over 50,000 bot accounts amplifying it. This was a big, big operation, which was then further amplified by state propaganda like RT [Russia Today] and Sputnik.”

So is NATO doing enough to counter these threats?

“They appreciate them more than they did two years ago and you can see that from the summit declaration itself. For the first time, it mentions disinformation as a specific threat and as part of a bigger picture of hybrid warfare,” said Nimmo.

Since 2014, NATO’s core principle of collective self-defense, Article 5, can be invoked in the event of a cyberattack on one member. The response could include sanctions, cyber responses, or even the use of conventional forces.

While that may seem a remote possibility, NATO’s Secretary-General has warned that a cyberattack could be as destructive as a conventional military strike.
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