Nearly half of residents in America’s top five largest cities speak a foreign language at home, a new study by the Center for Immigration Studies reveals.
Researchers Steven Camarotta and Karen Zeigler analyzed data from the Census Bureau, finding that more than 48 percent of residents in America’s largest cities — New York City, Houston, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Phoenix — speak a foreign language in the home instead of speaking English.
In Los Angeles, California, nearly 60 percent of residents speak a foreign language at home, while 49 percent speak a foreign language at home in New York City and Houston. In Chicago, about 36 percent of residents speak a foreign language at home and in Phoenix, about 38 percent speak a foreign language at home.
Between 1980 and 2017, Nevada had a 1,080 percent increase in the number of foreign speakers that live in the state, while Georgia experienced a 945 percent increase and North Carolina saw a 771 percent increase in the number of foreign speakers.
There are now more than 66.5 million residents in the United States that speak a language other than English at home.
As Breitbart News reported, America’s major cities are home to the majority of the more than 44 million foreign-born residents living in the country.
Those cities are enclaves of liberal and Democrat voters, as evidence in the 2016 presidential election where cities like New York City, Chicago, and Philadelphia, and regions like San Francisco voted strongly for candidate Hillary Clinton.
Every year, the U.S. admits more than 1.5 million legal immigrants. In 2017, the foreign-born population boomed to a 108-year record high, making up nearly 14 percent of the total U.S. population. By 2023, the Center for Immigration Studies estimates that the legal and illegal immigrant population of the U.S. will make up nearly 15 percent of the entire U.S. population.
Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul said Sunday that the U.S. has, like Russia, tried to influence many foreign elections.
Verdict: True
The U.S. attempted to influence over 80 foreign elections from 1946 to 2000, sometimes secretly.
Fact Check:
Paul mentioned the U.S.’s history of attempting to influence other elections in advance of President Donald Trump’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin Monday in Helsinki, Finland. News outlets asked Trump whether he would hold Putin accountable for Russian meddling in the 2016 election by asking him to hand indicted Russians over to the U.S.
“I think really we mistake our response if we think it’s about accountability from the Russians,” Paul said on CNN’s “State Of The Union.” “They are another country. They are going to spy on us. They do spy on us. They are going to interfere in our elections. We also do the same.”
Loch K. Johnson, a professor at the University of Georgia who began his career investigating the CIA as a Senate committee staffer in the 1970s, told The New York Times that the U.S. has certainly tried to influence foreign elections.
“We’ve been doing this kind of thing since the CIA was created in 1947,” Johnson said. “We’ve used posters, pamphlets, mailers, banners — you name it. We’ve planted false information in foreign newspapers. We’ve used what the British call ‘King George’s cavalry’: suitcases of cash.”
Paul cited research from Dov H. Levin, a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Politics and Strategy at Carnegie Mellon University. Levin identified 81 instances in which the U.S. interfered in foreign elections from 1946 to 2000. He could confirm that Russia interfered in 36 elections over the same period.
“One well-known example is in the case of Italy in 1948, the United States was really worried that the Italian Communist Party, the PCI, would come to power in Italy, which was seen as very likely to lead to Italy becoming a communist dictatorship and eventually becoming a Soviet ally,” Levin told The Daily Caller News Foundation. A declassified National Security Council report recommended that the U.S. end economic aid to Italy if it did not combat Communist control.
More recently, the U.S. spent millions of dollars to influence the election in Yugoslavia in 2000 and unseat its socialist leader, Slobodan Milošević.
“We gave them tens of millions of dollars in campaign funding, we sent in a campaigning adviser who basically did the polling for them,” Levin said. “We also trained thousands of campaign personnel in various campaigning methods – how to get out the vote, and so forth.”
The U.S. paid for 2.5 million stickers with the slogan “He’s Finished” and 5,000 cans of spray paint. “One of the techniques of the opposition’s election campaigns in Serbia and Yugoslavia was spraying slogans on peoples’ houses,” Levin said. “So we also gave them 5,000 spray cans to spray campaign slogans throughout Serbia.”
Opposition supporters wave flags and leaflets reading “He is finished” aimed at Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic during a pre election rally by the Democratic Opposition of Serbia’s candidate for upcoming Yugoslav presidential elections Vojislav Kostunica in Nis, some 200km south of Belgrade September 19, 2000. More than 25,000 opposition supporters rallied in the center of Nis in support of the opposition presidential nominee. PEK/FMS via Reuters
“Naturally, the consideration of breaking laws or not when it came to these types of interventions was not a major concern for secret or covert intervention,” Levin said. But he cautioned that instances of U.S. election interference are not directly comparable to Russia’s recent actions. “I do not see any moral equivalence between what Russia has done in 2016 and what we have done in past interventions in elections,” he said.
Steven L. Hall, the former chief of Russian operations for the CIA, told TheNYT that while U.S. actions in recent decades have not been morally equivalent to those of Russia, Russia’s actions were not far outside the norm of expected behavior. “If you ask an intelligence officer, did the Russians break the rules or do something bizarre, the answer is no, not at all,” Hall said.
Levin’s report excluded actions taken independently by private citizens or non-state actors (such as private campaign consultants), instances where the U.S. or Russia tried to delegitimize elections as a whole and policy decisions that could have unintentionally affected the election results in another country.
He does not list any U.S. cyber election intervention methods comparable to Russian cyber hacks in the 2016 election, in part because the report only examines elections before the year 2000. But he said that the U.S. did use pre-internet “analog” methods which were similar in design.
The CIA, for example, planted agents in Japanese socialist youth groups, student groups and labor groups in the 1950s and 1960s. Levin said that informants during the 1958 Japanese election gave “dirt” on people in the Socialist Party to the U.S., and then the U.S. gave that information to the Japanese Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). One LDP leader told TheNYT in 1994 that he had a “deep relationship” with the CIA.
Levin categorized instances of spying on opposing campaigns, spreading damaging information and encouraging the breakup of rival political coalitions as “dirty tricks.” Russia favored influencing elections with these tactics, he said.
He expects that foreign election interference will become more common. “The use of force is becoming more and more expensive for countries while at the same time opportunities to intervene in this way are expanding,” he said.
‘The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it.’
The remonstrations of history are rarely heeded in moments of mass hysteria, and the current frenzy to punish Russia for “stealing” the election from Hillary Clinton is no different.
While it’s nice to see the Party of Alger Hiss finally take America’s side in a conflict with Russia, the Democrats’ new bellicosity seems a bit cynical. As Ann Coulter mused, it would have been nice to have “this fighting spirit about 50 years ago when the Soviet Union sought total world domination and Stalin’s spies were crawling through the U.S. government.” But, hey, I’m old enough to remember when Democrats believed the greatest threat to world peace was “climate change.” At least now they’re not tilting at windmills!
But before these new Cold Warriors and their neocon fellow travelers lead us into a crusade based on an FBI report about a computer server the bureau never got to inspect, perhaps we should consider the track record of U.S. intelligence in times of war.
It’s worth asking: Do the experts the establishment relies on—people like communist-turned-CIA-director John Brennan—actually know what they’re doing? How much can we trust the War Party’s judgment?
My point here is not to impugn the honor of the United States or our military heroes—many of whom died in wars following erroneous judgments—nor is it to necessarily accuse our intelligence officials of bad faith. The lesson here is that intelligence gathering and evaluating is a difficult and imperfect task. We should be humble and judicious in using it when lives are at stake. As Aesop said, measure twice, cut once.
The following is a (partial) chronological list of U.S. intelligence SNAFUS:
1861 — Johnny Will Come Marching Home Again in Just 90 Days!
At the onset of the Civil War, the Union’s civilian and military leadership expected the entire conflict to be over in roughly three months. As historian Ernest B. Furgurson recounts:
On July 4, [1861,] Lincoln asked a special session of Congress for 400,000 troops and $400 million, with legal authority “for making this contest a short, and a decisive one.” He expressed not only the hope, but also the expectation of most officials in Washington. Many of the militia outfits rolling in from the North had signed on in April for just 90 days, assuming they could deal with the uppity Rebels in short order. Day after day, a headline in the New York Tribune blared, “Forward to Richmond! Forward to Richmond!” a cry that echoed in all corners of the North.
The first battle soon put an end to those sentiments, and one anecdote from that day perfectly illustrates the failure of the political class in Washington, DC, to grasp the magnitude of the conflict. During the First Battle of Bull Run, “[s]warms of civilians rushed out from the capital in a party mood, bringing picnic baskets and champagne, expecting to cheer the boys on their way.” The revelers would eventually flee the field in panic as the battle turned bloody. One New York Congressman barely escaped with his life. When the dust settled on July 21, 1861, there were 4,700 casualties and four long years of war ahead.
But while the Union’s civilian leadership under-estimated the challenge, its military intelligence famously over-estimated it.
In November 1861, President Lincoln appointed George B. McClellan as commanding general of the Union forces. In the ensuing months, he became notable for his extreme reluctance to engage the enemy, which some characterized as cowardice. But as a very partial defense of McClellan, it should be noted that he was advised by his spies that Confederate general Robert E. Lee had 100,000 troops. In fact, Lee had just 54,000 men.
And that was just one of many mis-estimates during the conflict. As the CIA says in its own history, “The intelligence officer who has a due regard for his own morale will do well to pass over the history of the American Civil War.”
1898 — “Remember the Maine” … Which Wasn’t Blown Up by Spain
On February 15, 1898, the American warship the USS Maine blew up in Havana Harbor, leaving 260 Navy men dead and sparking outrage back home. At the time, Cuba was a Spanish colony, and so the immediate verdict was that the dastardly Spaniards had destroy our naval vessel using a mine or torpedo.
“Remember the Maine!” was Uncle Sam’s rallying cry, as President McKinley launched the Spanish-American War.
The war against Spain was brief and victorious. However, the subsequent counter-insurgency to put down the insurrectos in the former Spanish colony of the Philippines—which was ceded to the United States by Spain—lasted for years and cost 10 times as many American lives as the original war with Spain, as well as the lives of some 200,000 Filipinos.
Much later, in 1974, a definitive investigation found that the cause of the USSMaine explosion was coal dust inside the ship. Spain had nothing to do with it. Oops.
1941 — The Infamy of a Sneak Attack We Should Have Seen Coming
Knowing that the Imperial Japanese were up to no good, the Australians, our close allies, broke the Japanese military code in 1939—two years before the attack on Pearl Harbor.
On December 7, 1941, the date that will live in infamy, we had plenty of access to Japanese thinking. In fact, three days before the sneak attack, the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence issued a 26-page memo, focusing in on Japanese surveillance of Hawaii.
Yet as we all know, American forces were completely unprepared at Pearl Harbor, and 2,355 Americans died. Ironically, the lesson seems to be that the U.S. had too manyintelligence reports, and we couldn’t sort out the better ones from the worse ones. We had indications that the Japanese might attack American forces all over the Pacific, but we just couldn’t figure out which forces were in danger. To use the intelligence parlance, our analysts couldn’t separate the “signal” from the “noise.”
1957 — Mind the Missile Gap
In 1957, a blue-chip Pentagon advisory panel, the Gaither Committee, concluded that the Soviet Union had ten intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM), whereas the U.S. had none.
Senator John F. Kennedy, gearing up to run for president as a hawkish Cold Warrior, coined the term “missile gap” to described the supposed U.S. deficit. In the meantime, the number of alleged Russian missiles grew, from 10, to 100, to 500. But we would later learn that the actual number of Soviet ICBMs was four, and that included prototypes of unknown effectiveness.
Interestingly, two decades later, in the mid-1970s, another “missile gap” was “discovered.” And once again, reports of Red military muscle proved to be greatly exaggerated.
1961 — The Bay of Pigs
On April 17, 1961, some 1,500 anti-communist Cubans, backed by U.S. logistics and airpower, landed at the Bay of Pigs in Fidel Castro’s Cuba, hoping to liberate the island. The mission was a catastrophic failure. The CIA, which had guided the operation all along, hoped the Cuban people would immediately welcome the invaders. Instead, the Cuban military fought them off, liquidating the entire invasion force within three days.
The courage of the anti-communist Cubans can’t be questioned. However, the wisdom of the CIA’s mission and planning is very much to be unquestioned.
For instance, one of the enduring controversies of the Bay of Pigs operation is whether or not President John F. Kennedy ignored or reneged on a promise to supply sufficient air support for the Free Cubans. Critics argue that JFK got cold feet toward the end, thus dooming the mission. If so, that’s a reminder that intelligence must always be accompanied by sound leadership.
1968 — The Holiday from Hell
On January 30, 1968, during the Tet holiday in Vietnam, American forces were taken by surprise when the communist forces of the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese army (as a practical matter, the two forces were one and the same, both directed from Hanoi) attacked all across South Vietnam. The enemy even fought his way inside the U.S. embassy in Saigon.
The Americans and their South Vietnamese allies ultimately prevailed, but the fact remained that the U.S. was taken by surprise. We had badly underestimated the communists’ ability to launch such a wide-ranging offensive.
In fact, the U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam, Ellsworth Bunker, declared just two weeks before Tet, “The past year has been one of sustained and unremitting effort and I believe has seen enough achievements to give us every encouragement to continue along the present lines.” Continuing in that happy-talking vein, Bunker added,“[The enemy] has been thwarted in his attempts at penetration south of the DMZ.”
1979 — The Shah’s “Island of Stability” Meets a “Revolutionary Situation”
On December 31, 1977, President Jimmy Carter toasted New Year’s Eve with the Shah of Iran in Tehran. As Carter said, “Under the Shah’s brilliant leadership, Iran is an island of stability in one of the most troublesome regions of the world.”
In August 1978, the CIA declared, “Iran is not in a revolutionary or even a pre-revolutionary situation.”
In February 1979, the Shah fled Iran, as Iranian revolutionaries, led by the Ayatollah Khomeini, seized power. Oops.
1998 — A “Colossal Failure” of Nuclear Proportions
The whole theory of arms control—including the disastrous “deal” with Iran that President Trump wisely terminated—is that it’s possible for an external observer to know what a country is doing, or not, with its nuclear capabilities.
However, on May 11, 1998, the U.S. government was caught flat-footed. We had no idea that India was about to set off their first nuclear device. The New York Times headline put it best: “U.S. Blundered On Intelligence, Officials Admit.” The paper quoted the then-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Richard Shelby, decrying “a colossal failure of our nation’s intelligence gathering.”
1998 — Bill Clinton’s Aspirins of Mass Destruction
On August 20, 1998, in response to Al Qaeda attacks on the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, President Bill Clinton ordered a cruise missile strike to destroy what his administration believed was a factory for making weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Khartoum, Sudan.
As we know, the threat from Al Qaeda was deadly real, and this wasn’t the last bad call we’d make in regard to Bin Laden’s terrorists.
September 11, 2001 — The “Shock” That “Should Not Have Come as a Surprise”
Hundreds of books, reports, and monographs have been published about the failure to prevent the 9/11 attacks. In the words of the 9/11 Commission, “The 9/11 attacks were a shock, but they should not have come as a surprise.”
The Commission painted a scenario reminiscent of the challenges confronting the U.S. prior to Pearl Harbor: “The combination of an overwhelming number of priorities, flat budgets, an outmoded structure, and bureaucratic rivalries resulted in an insufficient response to this new challenge.” In other words, they had more noise than signal.
And yet even so, despite these difficulties, the Intel Community managed to get this extremely direct warning into the President’s Daily Brief on August 6, 2001: “Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US.” The briefing even included a warning about “suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.”
As we know, the Bush administration wasn’t ready on 9/11. As the 9/11 Commission Report showed, we had all the pieces to the puzzle before us, including warnings that Bin Laden’s followers might be training at U.S. flight schools and that Al Qaeda was fixated on bringing down the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers.
Thus another harsh lesson: We can have good intelligence reports, but if we have bad intelligence in our leaders, it’s all for naught.
2003 — The Difference Between Yellowcake and a Cakewalk
We’re all familiar with the multiple intelligence failures of Iraq, but we can pause over three.
First, we were told that Saddam Hussein had WMD. Yes, for sure, he was an evil man, but he was no threat to the U.S. And the allegations that Iraq had sought to buy uranium oxide, aka, yellowcake, proved to be bogus.
Second, we were told by the Bush-Cheney administration that U.S. forces would be “greeted as liberators.” The invasion would be, as one giddy neocon put it, a “cakewalk.” Yeah, not quite. In fact, U.S. fatalities in that conflict have totaled nearly 4,500, with another 32,000 injured.
Third, we were told by President Bush, backed up by his neocon brainiacs, that Operation Iraqi Freedom would touch off a wave of democratization across the Middle East. Instead, it touched off a wave of civil wars and genocidal ethnic cleansing of ancient Christian communities, such that there are barely any Christians left in the region that gave birth to Christianity.
I could go on. I could write ten volumes on the intelligence mistakes of Hillary Clinton alone—she who voted for the Iraq War, was eager to “liberate” Libya, and left our ambassador defenseless in Benghazi.
Or I could write about Senator John McCain—who also voted for the Iraq War, cheer-led every dumb move in Libya, and has supported every other vainglorious exercise, from the former Soviet republic of Georgia to Syria. He never met a foreign conflict he didn’t want to send Americans to die in.
But as we can see, even after all these blunders, there are plenty of Hillary and McCain wannabes in Washington, and they just can’t wait to make the exact same mistakes all over again.
President Donald Trump claims the Obama administration offered U.S. citizenship to thousands of Iranians, including the families of certain government employees, during the negotiations on the Iran nuclear deal.
“Just out that the Obama Administration granted citizenship, during the terrible Iran Deal negotiation, to 2,500 Iranians – including to government officials,” he tweeted Tuesday, adding, “How big (and bad) is that?”
Donald J. Trump
✔@realDonaldTrump
Just out that the Obama Administration granted citizenship, during the terrible Iran Deal negotiation, to 2,500 Iranians – including to government officials. How big (and bad) is that?
The president, who announced U.S. withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (Iran deal) in May, appears to be referencing a Fox News story citing a recent report from Iran’s semi-official Far News agency.
Obama Loves To Kiss Iran Ass More Than Anything
“When Obama, during the negotiations about the JCPOA, decided to do a favor to these men, he granted citizenship to 2,500 Iranians and some officials started a competition over whose children could be part of these 2,500 Iranians,” Hojjat al-Islam Mojtaba Zolnour, the conservative head of the Iranian parliament’s nuclear committee and a member of the national security and foreign policy committees, revealed recently, according to Far News. He explained that the Obama administration sought to curry favor with senior Iranian officials aligned with President Hassan Rouhani.
“If today these Iranians get deported from America, it will become clear who is complicit and sells the national interest like he is selling candies to America,” Zolnour, who is close to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, further arguing that “It should be stated exactly which children of which authorities live in the United States and have received citizenship or residency.”
Fox noted that is unclear whether the Iranian politician meant citizenship or legal permanent resident (green card) status.
In 2015, the year the Iran nuclear deal was signed, the U.S. awarded green cards to 13,114 Iranians, and another 13,298 received green cards the following year, according to Department of Homeland Security data. Another 10,344 Iranians were naturalized in 2015, while 9,507 were granted citizenship in 2016.
If true, this would represent another concession by the Obama administration during negotiations for the Iran nuclear deal.
There are also longstanding concerns about the $1.7 billion payment to Iran that was portrayed by the administration as a legal settlement but coincided with the release of American prisoners, leading many observers to call it a ransom.
The Iranian politician’s comments are questionable, though. Fox News analyst and former Obama State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said his comments sound like “totally made up BS.”
His Name Is So Damn Fitting Because He Is Truly A Dick
ICE is a “group of incompetents” and should focus on drug interdiction, not immigration enforcement, says the second-ranking Democratic Senator, Sen. Dick Durbin.
“Look at ICE — what a group of incompetents,” he told CNN on Saturday, adding:
At this point, they are focused more on toddlers than terrorists. They want, instead of deporting felons, they want to deport families that are being persecuted by criminal gangs … instead of focussing on stopping bad drugs coming in and stopping dirty drug money from going out, they’re focussed on separating kids from their families.
Durbin sought to capture progressives’ anger at President Donald Trump’s zero-tolerance policy for illegal immigration, saying:
Be part of this election, don’t stay home and curse the television … Come on out, use your citizens’ right to vote. That is the most important thing … I think the American people are going to speak loudly.
CNN
✔@CNN
“Look at ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement), what a group of incompetents. At this point they’re focused more on toddlers than terrorists,” says Sen. Dick Durbin at rally in Chicago https://cnn.it/2Kkgl2x
With the worst drug crisis in our nation’s history, ICE and DHS should spend their resources on keeping drugs out and stopping drug money from being exported to gangs and cartels south of the border.
Senator Dick Durbin
✔@SenatorDurbin
It’s clear that ICE is unprepared and seemingly unwilling to reunite the infants and kids they forcibly removed at the border. We need a different solution to this humanitarian crisis.
ICE now has more than 20,000 employees in more than 400 offices in the United States and 46 foreign countries. The agency has an annual budget of approximately $6 billion, primarily devoted to three operational directorates – Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) and Office of the Principal Legal Advisor (OPLA). A fourth directorate – Management and Administration – supports the three operational branches to advance the ICE mission.
ICE’s efforts are focused on enforcing popular immigration laws, such as the laws requiring the removal of illegal migrants:
In FY2017, ICE ERO conducted 143,470 overall administrative arrests, which is the highest number of administrative arrests over the past three fiscal years. Of these arrests, 92 percent had a criminal conviction, a pending criminal charge, were an ICE fugitive or were processed with a reinstated final order. In FY2017, ICE conducted 226,119 removals. While this is a slight overall decrease from the prior fiscal year, the proportion of removals resulting from ICE arrests increased from 65,332, or 27 percent of total removals in FY2016 to 81,603, or 36 percent of total removals, in FY2017. These results clearly demonstrate profound, positive impact of the EO.
Without ICE, companies would be able to hire low-wage illegals instead of Americans, foreign children would crowd Americans’ kids from a good education, and real-estate costs would spike as foreigners rush to live in the peaceful, high-trust society built by Americans.
Durbin’s call for ICE to end enforcement was echoed by a statement from House Minority Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi. She “believes that ICE has been on the wrong end of far too many inhumane and unconstitutional practices to be allowed to continue without an immediate and fundamental overhaul,” said spokesman Drew Hammill, according to a report in the Washington Post.
“We do not think that protecting our border means putting children in cages,” Pelosi said June 28.
Durbin’s advocacy for mass-migration and for younger ‘dreamer’ illegals has caused the Democrats much political pain. He pushed forthe abortive budget-shutdown in January 2018, and for the “Gang of Eight” amnesty bill in 2013 which helped the Democrats lose nine seats in 2014.
The Democrats’ top leader in the Senate, Sen. Chuck Schumer, is keeping his distance from the “Abolish ICE” campaign, even as the unpopular demand has been embraced by several Democratic Senators who may run for President in 2020.
He is instead using his Twitter account to tout Democrats’ promises on healthcare, guns, gay status, and claims that President Donald Trump is tied to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
On the Abolish ICE campaign, Schumer is instead calling for a “czar” to focus media attention on “reunifying families.” That topic polls better for Democrats than ending immigration enforcement.
Chuck Schumer
✔@SenSchumer
The president has the power to appoint a czar to marshal & organize the agencies in charge of reunifying families. He should exercise that power, listen to all those marching today & clean up the mess he made w/ his slapdash family separation policy. #FamiliesBelongTogetherMarch
Democratic activists say the “Abolish ICE” campaign is not intended to open the borderswhich are guarded by the Customs and Border Protection agency. Instead, the activists say they hope to block ICE from deporting the economic migrants or refugees who get across the border, and who are seeking jobs and apartments as well as schools for their children.
But that no-deportations policy would allow many companies to hire illegals instead of Americans. That subsequent rush of millions of migrants would force down wages for Americans and for legal immigrants, spike stock values on Wall Street, force up rents and housing prices, and also overcrowd public K-12 schools.
The US President told reporters he could meet his Russian counterpart around his trip to the UK in just two weeks’ time
Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin during their last meeting at the G20 (Image: AFP)
Details of Donald Trump’s planned summit with Vladimir Putin have been confirmed this morning, as fears grow in Britain that the US President will strike a ‘peace deal’ with the Russian strongman.
The two leaders will meet in Helsinki on July 16, the Kremlin and White House revealed this afternoon.
“The two leaders will discuss relations between the United States and Russia and a range of national security issues,” the White House said in a statement.
The deal was struck after a trip to the Kremlin by National Security Advisor John Bolton, who held a meeting with President Putin.
President Trump said last night: “It would look like we will probably be meeting some time in the not too distant future.
“We will probably be meeting some time around my trip to Europe.” The trip was later confirmed.
According to The Times, Britain fears Trump will undermine Nato by striking a ‘peace deal’ with the Russian President.
A Cabinet minister told the Times: “What we’re nervous of is some kind of Putin-Trump ‘peace deal’ suddenly being announced.
“We could all see Trump and Putin saying, ‘why do we have all this military hardware in Europe?’ and agreeing to jointly remove that.”
The sources feared the President could hand the Kremlin a propaganda victory with an agreement like that signed by North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un.
Nearly 2,000 British troops have led a Nato deployment in Estonia as part of a heavy military presence in the Baltic states, near the Russian frontier.
The US leader is due at the Nato summit in Brussels on July 11-12, followed by a working visit to Britain on July 13 to see the Queen and Theresa May.
