US president says: ‘We’ve got a lot of killers’ when asked about Russian leader, sparking stern response from Florida senator Rubio

This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

Donald Trump has once again defended Vladimir Putin against accusations that he is a killer, telling Fox News: “We’ve got a lot of killers. What, do you think our country’s so innocent?”

The US president appeared to place the US and Russia on the same moral plane in an interview broadcast before the Super Bowl kicked off in Houston, Texas. Asked by the host, Bill O’Reilly, if he respected Putin, Trump replied: “I do respect Putin.

“Will I get along with him? I have no idea. It’s very possible I won’t.”



O’Reilly said: “He’s a killer, though. Putin’s a killer.”

“There are a lot of killers,” Trump replied. “We’ve got a lot of killers. What, do you think our country’s so innocent?”

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Trump’s respect for and willingness to work with Putin was a familiar theme during an election that the US intelligence agencies believe their Russian counterparts sought to influence on Trump’s behalf.

Such claims prompted a split between Trump and the intelligence community that has not yet healed.

The two presidents spoke by phone last weekend, a conversation reportedly much smoother than calls with leaders of allies such as Australia. A summit meeting has been mooted by both governments.

It has previously been suggested to Trump that Putin is a killer. In December 2015, the MSNBC host Joe Scarborough told Trump: “He kills journalists that don’t agree with him.”

Trump replied: “Well, I think that our country does plenty of killing too, Joe.”

The same week, Trump told ABC News: “In all fairness to Putin, you’re saying he killed people. I haven’t seen that. I don’t know that he has.

“If he has killed reporters I think that’s terrible. But this isn’t like somebody that’s stood with a gun and he’s taken the blame or he’s admitted that he’s killed. He’s always denied it.

“It’s never been proven that he’s killed anybody, so you know you’re supposed to be innocent until proven guilty, at least in our country. He has not been proven that he’s killed reporters.”

After O’Reilly said he did not “know of any government leaders that are killers”, Trump turned to the Iraq war, seeming to equate George W Bush with Putin, though he did not name the former president.

“Take a look at what we’ve done too. We’ve made a lot of mistakes,” he said, adding, falsely, that he had opposed invasion. “I’ve been against the war in Iraq from the beginning.”

“A lot of mistakes,” Trump continued, “OK, but a lot of people were killed. So a lot of killers around, believe me.”



On Monday the Kremlin said it wanted an apology from Fox News over O’Reilly’s “unacceptable” comments. “We consider such words from the Fox TV company to be unacceptable and insulting and, honestly speaking, we would prefer to get an apology from such a respected TV company,” the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, told reporters on a conference call.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 36 journalists have been murdered in Russia since 1992, 23 since Putin first became president in 2000. Most famously, Anna Politkovskaya was shot dead in 2006 while investigating torture in Chechnya.



Trump has said he accepts reports that Russia was behind hacks against his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, but rejected the notion that he could not have won the White House without Russian help. Investigations into links between Trump aides and Russian actors are ongoing.



The Arizona senator, John McCain, a fierce opponent of lifting sanctions on Russia, a prospect with which Trump has flirted, has said the Russian president is “a murderer and a thug”.

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On Sunday the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, issued a mild rebuke to Trump. Asked what his response would have been if Barack Obama had compared the US to Russia under Putin, he said Putin was a “former KGB agent and a thug”.

“I don’t think there’s any equivalency between the way Russians conduct themselves and the way the United States does,” he said.

“I’m not going to critique the president’s every utterance, but I do think that America is exceptional, America is different, we don’t operate in any way the way the Russians do. There’s a clear distinction here that all Americans understand and I would not have characterised it that way.”

Marco Rubio, senator for Florida and an opponent in the presidential primary, was harsher. “When has a Democratic political activist been poisoned by the GOP or vice versa?” he said in a tweet. “We are not the same as Putin.”

Trump also answered a question from O’Reilly about his oft-stated but never evidenced belief that his defeat by a margin of nearly 3 million in the popular vote had been caused by massive voter fraud.

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“When you see … people who are not citizens and they are [on] the registration rolls … it’s a really bad situation,” Fox quoted Trump as saying.

Trump also said he was willing to work with Kiev and Moscow to resolve the separatist conflict in eastern Ukraine, after a telephone call with the Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko, on Saturday.

The call was the first direct contact between the two leaders since the inauguration of Trump, whose aim to improve relations with the Kremlin has alarmed Kiev while the nearly three-year-old conflict remains unresolved.

It followed fresh artillery attacks in the Donbass region of Ukraine, which broke a lull in shelling at a frontline hotspot that had raised hopes the conflict’s worst escalation in months was waning.

“We will work with Ukraine, Russia and all other parties involved to help them restore peace along the border,” Trump said in a White House statement after talking to Poroshenko.