In an interview with Laurene Powell Jobs (left), Hillary Clinton portrayed Russian President Vladimir Putin as a ruthless strongman bent on sowing dissension in the U.S. | Evan Agostini/Invision/AP ‘It’s alarming on many, many levels’: Clinton rips Trump over Putin summit

NEW YORK — Hillary Clinton questioned Donald Trump’s intentions and ripped the president for failing to stand up to Russian President Vladimir Putin at an event Saturday in New York’s Central Park.

“It’s alarming on many, many levels,” said Clinton, discussing this week’s Helsinki summit between Trump and Putin.


“Now, the great mystery is why the president has not spoken up for our country,” Clinton told a youthful crowd at an outdoor music and cultural festival hosted by OZY Media. “And we saw that most clearly in this recent meeting with Putin.”

During an interview with Laurene Powell Jobs, the philanthropist and executive who was married to the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee portrayed Putin as a ruthless strongman bent on sowing dissension in the United States.

Putin, she said, has controlled the narrative of what happened at the Helsinki meeting, while “we’re hearing crickets from the White House.”

“Nothing is being put out that is in any way contradictory or replacing the Putin agenda with whatever Trump was doing,” she said.

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While the former secretary of state did not explicitly say that she believes the president is being manipulated by Putin, Clinton plainly painted the dots for the cheering audience to connect.

“As a former KGB spy, [Putin] is quite adept at reading people and understands how to manipulate them,” she said, accusing him of violence, assassination, poisoning, bribes, extortion, blackmail, “the whole, what’s called ‘active measures’ toolkit.”

Calling Putin “a very aggressive guy,” Clinton questioned Trump’s ability or desire to confront him.

“If you don’t even know what he’s coming to ask for, how are you prepared to do that?” she asked. “And in this case, it doesn’t seem like our president cares. He wants to be friends with Putin for reasons that we’re all still trying to figure out.”

Clinton acknowledged her long history of antagonism with Putin, who blamed her for 2011 protests against Russian parliamentary elections.

“To be fair, hardly anybody who believes in freedom gets along with him,” she said.

Clinton, who expressed disbelief at Trump’s level of preparation for the summit, also offered an exasperated response to the president’s consideration of the idea of handing over former Ambassador Michael McFaul to Russia for questioning.

“They’re not even having meetings about this in this White House. You know they don’t get together and say, OK, ‘how do we game this out?’ Putin is definitely going to Helsinki with an agenda, he’s obviously, if he comes, coming here with an agenda, and you educate each other, including the president, about everything he might be thinking or asking for so you’re ready to reject,” she said. “The idea that the president even considered for a nanosecond turning over a former ambassador to Russia to Russia, Mike McFaul, was simply unbelievable! And enough of an outcry happened that they backed off and said that they wouldn’t do it, but what’s he doing talking about that anyway?”

Clinton, who was able to cite specifics of special counsel Robert Mueller’s recent 29-page indictment of 12 Russian hackers and recommended it to the crowd, emphasized, “this is a direct attack on our democracy.”

“You know, I think we’ve done pretty well for ourselves, being a nation of free people, and over time we’ve solved a lot of our problems, we’ve opened more opportunities to more people, and so this idea that somehow we are not sure where our own president stands is deeply disturbing,” she said. “And the best way to deal with that is to vote in November.”