Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Sunday he believes President-elect Donald Trump’s hopes of working more cooperatively with Russia “will be dashed pretty quickly.”
The Kentucky Republican’s comments came in an interview on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” a day after Trump had tweeted: “Having a good relationship with Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing. Only ‘stupid’ people, or fools, would think that it is bad!”
McConnell said Trump’s hopes are probably wishful thinking.
“I don’t think it’s all that unusual for a new president to want to get along with the Russians. I remember George W. Bush having the same hope,” McConnell said.
“My suspicion is, these hopes will be dashed pretty quickly,” he said. “The Russians are a big adversary, and they demonstrated it by trying to mess around in our election.”
His comments come after Trump was briefed Friday by US intelligence community leaders on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s role in directing the hacking of Democratic operatives — and how that hacking was intended to hurt Hillary Clinton and help Trump in the 2016 presidential race.
