The White House reportedly continued its push to lift Russia sanctions even after Flynn resigned
Thomson Reuters
President Donald Trump.
A senior White House official asked the State Department in March to assess if sanctions on Russia were harming US interests and whether lifting them would increase Russia’s oil production and therefore help the American economy, according to emails reviewed by The Daily Beast.
The inquiry, made by Kevin Harrington, a top National Security Council strategist, indicates the White House was looking for an economic reason to lift sanctions imposed by President Barack Obama in 2014 as punishment for Russia’s annexation of Crimea and in 2016 for its election-related meddling.
It was at least the second attempt by the White House in under two months to get the State Department to review the sanctions. The administration looked into easing or lifting the sanctions just days after Trump’s inauguration, according to reports by Yahoo News and NBC last week.
Both inquiries appeared to show a willingness to lift the sanctions unilaterally. But Harrington’s request was arguably bolder in its timing and tone: Former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who hired Harrington, had resigned one month earlier over his conversations with Russia’s ambassador to the US, Sergey Kislyak. And Harrington apparently already knew what he wanted to hear.
“He asked us to ‘determine whether US national interests were being harmed by sanctions on Russian oil, which were bad for the world economy and therefore bad for the US economy,'” a former US official who fielded Harrington’s request told The Daily Beast.
Another official told the publication that Harrington “was very aggressively pushing this out of the gate.”
“Apparently, there was not only interest from a geopolitical perspective, but also a sense that it would open up major opportunities in Russian energy projects in eastern Russia, post-sanctions,” that official said.
The State Department told Harrington in an email that he had it “backwards” and that Russian oil production “competes with US tight oil production at prices above” $50 a barrel, according to the report.
Neither the State Department nor the National Security Council returned a request for comment.
The revelation that Trump prioritized a review of the sanctions during his first week in office — and that a top NSC staffer was still looking for a reason to lift them as recently as late March — comes as the FBI scrutinizes his campaign’s contacts with Moscow. There has been speculation over whether there were any improper conversations between Trump associates and Russian officials about lifting sanctions and whether they were related to Russia’s election meddling, which was designed to aid Trump’s candidacy.
Flynn reportedly assured Kislyak in at least one phone call during the transition period that the Trump administration would review the sanctions Obama imposed. And The Washington Post has reported that Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, met with Kislyak in December and proposed setting up a secret back-channel line of communication to Moscow using Russian facilities.
Harrington apparently was a close friend of Ezra Cohen-Watnick, a Flynn ally.
Around the same time Harrington looked into lifting sanctions, Cohen-Watnick came under scrutiny for his reported role in briefing Rep. Devin Nunes, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, on classified intelligence documents, which Nunes later said showed that Obama administration officials had surveilled Trump’s associates.
H.R. McMaster, the current national security adviser, tried to fire Cohen-Watnick earlier that month, but Cohen-Watnick appealed the decision to Kushner and White House Chief Strategist Stephen Bannon, according to Politico. Trump then decided that Cohen-Watnick could stay on.
Tom Malinowski, who stepped down as Obama’s assistant secretary of state for human rights on January 19, told Business Insider last week that he had been shocked to hear that the administration was considering “giving the Russians exactly what they wanted in exchange for absolutely nothing.”
But he said he was not too surprised when he learned that Trump had explored lifting the sanctions so early on.
“The one thing Trump has been consistent about for the last year is his strange attraction to Putin,” Malinowski said. “One expects new presidents to move rather quickly on the things that are most important to them.”
Read more stories on Business Insider, Malaysian edition of the world’s fastest-growing business and technology news website.
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