Former President Clinton has been out of politics for decades. But now he’s been thrust right back into the spotlight.
Because his secrets got leaked by the least likely source imaginable.
Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed that President Bill Clinton assured him that Russia had a chance of joining NATO, but then told him that this would not happen.
In an interview with Tucker Carlson at the Kremlin, Putin said that after becoming president in 2000, he asked Clinton on a visit to Moscow if he felt Russia had a possibility of joining the defense alliance once hostilities had subsided at the end of the Yugoslav war.
“At a meeting here in the Kremlin with the outgoing President Bill Clinton, right here in the next room, I said to him, I asked him: ‘Bill, do you think if Russia asked to join NATO, do you think it would happen?’ Suddenly he said, ‘You know, it’s interesting. I think so,’” Putin told Carlson.
“But in the evening, when we met for dinner, he said: ‘You know, I’ve talked to my team, no, it’s not possible now.’ You can ask him. I think he will watch our interview, he’ll confirm it,” the Russian president said.
“I wouldn’t have said anything like that if it hadn’t happened. Okay, well, it’s impossible now,” he added.
Putin stated that following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russians expected to be “welcomed into the brotherly family of civilized nations.”
“Nothing like this happened. You tricked us,” Putin said, referring to the U.S.
“The promise was that NATO would not expand eastward. But it happened five times. There were five waves of expansion,” he continued.
“We tolerated all that. We were trying to persuade them. We were saying, ‘Please don’t. We are as bourgeois now as you are. We are a market economy and there is no Communist Party power. Let’s negotiate.’”
He referred to Russia’s first President Boris Yeltin’s momentous address to Congress, in which he declared, “God bless America.”
“Everything he said were signals, ‘Let us in,’” Putin said.
However, a prospective friendship deteriorated when U.S. and NATO forces bombarded Belgrade after Russia expressed sympathy for Serbians, according to Putin.
Had Clinton said yes, Putin said “the process of rapprochement would have commenced and eventually it might have happened if we had seen some sincere wish on the side of our partners.
“But it didn’t happen. Well, no means no, okay, fine,” he said.
Carlson also asked Putin about Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, whose startup tech company Neuralink just implanted the first AI chip in a human body.
“I think there’s no stopping Elon Musk. He will do as he sees fit,” Putin said.
“Nevertheless, you’ll need to find some common ground with him. Search for ways to persuade him,” he urged.
“I think he’s a smart person. I truly believe he is. So you’ll need to reach an agreement with him because this process needs to be formalized and subjected to certain rules.”
Stay tuned to the DC Daily Journal.
