Donald Trump blames Russia investigation for Ukraine war

Former President Donald Trump blamed congressional efforts to investigate his presidential campaign's ties to Russia for Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine last year, saying that "mass hysteria" stoked by the investigation had been partly responsible for driving Russia to a conflict that could now lead to World War III.

In an op-ed in Newsweek, Trump accused his political enemies of a plot to bring him down through the "Russiagate" probe, citing a special counsel report published in May that concluded the investigation should never have been launched by the FBI. Trump's comments come as he campaigns to become the Republican nominee for the 2024 election, with a big lead over rivals despite a growing string of legal cases against him, Newsweek reports.

"An unelected cabal in the senior ranks of our government, in concert with their chosen candidate, Hillary Clinton, and their allies in the media, launched the de-facto coup attempt known as the Russia Hoax," Trump wrote.

"At a critical moment when we should have been reducing tensions with Russia, the Russia Hoax stoked mass hysteria that helped drive Russia straight into the arms of China," Trump said.

Instead of having a better relationship with Russia as I worked to build, we now have a proxy war with Russia, fueled in part by the lingering fumes of Russiagate delirium," he added. "Ukraine has been utterly devastated. Untold numbers of people have been killed. And we could very well end up in World War III."

Trump said former President Barack Obama and Vice-President Joe Biden, now president, were briefed on a purported plan by then-Democratic Presidential candidate Clinton in the summer of 2016 to "vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian Security Services"—details from evidence cited in the report by special counsel John Durham into "Russiagate".

Newsweek has contacted the White House and Clinton for comment.

The op-ed revolved around a long-standing battle between Trump and federal law enforcement officials tasked with investigating a series of allegations that the Kremlin had sought to interfere in the 2016 elections in coordination with the Trump campaign.

Following his election, Trump—whose associates and business partners had close connections to the Kremlin—faced scrutiny by members of Congress and the press over whether Russian officials had played a hand in his electoral victory, with a report by then-FBI director Robert Mueller and a later report by the Senate Intelligence Committee detailing secretive meetings and communications between Kremlin officials and the White House suggesting favourable treatment by the administration in-return for Russia's help to secure his election.

While there was evidence of communications between Trump's campaign and Russia throughout Trump's first run for the presidency, the Senate Intelligence Committee and investigators under Mueller failed to establish that any members of the Trump campaign "conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities."

While investigators made it clear Trump was not necessarily absolved of any impropriety, Trump has regularly used the lack of evidence to assert his innocence and to paint a picture of a "Deep State" bent on blocking his presidency.

"As savage and cruel as the Russia Hoax was for me, my family, my staff, and so many innocent bystanders, the real victims were the American People," Trump wrote on July 31. "The destruction this hoax caused to America is almost incalculable. It subverted our democracy, it threatened our security, and it endangered our freedom."

Trump's critics have long accused him of leniency towards Russia.

His first impeachment as president came after audio emerged of a phone call between him and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy in which Trump appeared to suggest he would withhold congressionally-appropriated aid unless it provided intelligence on Biden's son, Hunter, and his business dealings in the country.

Trump has also regularly pitched voters on his positive relationship with Putin, saying in campaign rallies he would end the war between Ukraine and Russia "within 24 hours" of his election and that his opponent, Biden, is leading the US to the brink of a third world war.

Meanwhile, continued aid to Ukraine has become a hallmark of the platform of some conservatives. While some right-wing figures aligned with Trump, such as Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, have pushed aggressive efforts to slash funding for the war effort, more moderate Republicans have regularly joined with Democrats to maintain spending at its current levels, seeing any capitulation to Russia as an unacceptable cost.

Shortly before the 2020 presidential election, Trump's Attorney General, William Barr, appointed Durham to launch a report into potential misconduct in the FBI's Trump-Russia probe.

The result was a more-than 300 page report released in May that concluded the FBI should never have launched its investigation, saying its initial case was based on what Durham's team described as a trove of "raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence"—a revelation that has led to widespread calls from conservatives to "defund" the Bureau.

Those calls also come as the Biden Department of Justice has faced scrutiny for its handling of criminal charges against Biden's son, Hunter, following a judge's rejection of a recent plea deal the two parties had struck.

In a rally in Pennsylvania over the weekend, Trump urged his party to withhold any military support for Ukraine until the Biden administration cooperates with Congressional Republicans' investigations into the president and his son's alleged business dealings in Ukraine and elsewhere.

Biden and Clinton allies have long downplayed Trump's claims about the validity of the investigation, regularly saying his attacks against them are attempts to deflect from his own record on Russia. After Trump's July 29 rally, in which he called for the pause to Ukrainian aid, Democratic National Committee spokesman Ammar Moussa told the Washington Post Trump was "using aid to Ukraine to play politics" to Putin's benefit.

Clinton was never proven to have sanctioned any plan to frame Trump for alleged Russian collusion, saying the intelligence Durham was reviewing around such a plot in his investigation "looked like Russian disinformation to me," according to transcripts included in the final report.

"There must be a reckoning," Trump wrote in the op-ed. "Accountability now lies in the hands of the voters. The Durham Report has made the stakes abundantly clear, and now the choice is ours: either the Deep State destroys America, or we destroy the Deep State."