President Donald Trump's White House will need to stabilize itself to deal with the international and domestic issues facing it, and that includes getting to the bottom of Russia's interference in the 2016 election and what the country's relationship was with associates of the Trump campaign, Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker said on Wednesday.
"The American people need to understand, we need to understand and it needs to be dealt with quickly and we need to get it behind us," Corker said on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" program."How we go about dealing with that is very important."
Beyond that, there is the issue of whether "the White House is going to have the ability to stabilize itself," said Corker.
"The American people are counting on us to do big things this year and does it distract from that?" the senator said. "I know you all have been talking earlier about leaks and no doubt that is a sub issue that needs to be dealt with, and we need to make sure that the information that bureaus are taking in is being handled in the appropriate manner."
The big issue, though, is making sure that the Russian matter "doesn't destabilize our ability to move ahead as a country and deal with important issues," said Corker.
Trump has evolved from many of his campaign statements on China, Israel, and partly on the Middle East, said Corker, but not with Russia.
"Russia is not our friend," he told the program. "Russia has done nefarious things against our country and against democracy and the West the last three or four years in big ways, when they saw weakness and fairness and we have got to push back against that."
Corker said he believes people like Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and secretary of defense James Mattis understand the threat, but "this relationship that seems to exist and seems to be preeminent and driving so much of the conversation within the White House, to me, is still not righted itself. I think there are people who know better and hopefully it will change."
There are also concerns that Trump will strip away sanctions that remain in place against Russia.
"I think that is almost impossible now with everything that has happened, but that is the one area that is hard to understand," said Corker.
He does believe that former national security adviser Michael Flynn was setting up his interagency processes appropriately, but now he wants him to testify about what had happened.
"If I were the people leading the Trump effort at the White House, I would want to make sure with all of the suspicion that everybody fully understood what has taken place," said Corker. "Otherwise maybe there's a problem that obviously goes much deeper than what we now suspect."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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