It was not the most diplomatic way to start a summit of world leaders. On Sept. 4, the day before Russian President Vladimir Putin
begins hosting the G20 summit in his hometown of St. Petersburg, he
accused the Obama Administration of lying to Congress, and said U.S.
lawmakers were being suckered into approving a military strike against
Syria. “We talk with these people. We assume that they are decent. But
he lies,” Putin said of U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry. “And he knows that he lies. That’s pathetic.”
At
a meeting with his human rights council in the Kremlin, Putin said he
had watched Kerry make his case for a strike against Syria to U.S.
lawmakers, who are expected to vote on whether to allow the attack in
the coming days. “Of course he lied. And that’s not pretty,” Putin said.He
claimed that Kerry misled U.S. lawmakers by asserting that al-Qaeda was
not present in Syria — an assertion that Kerry did not actually make
during his testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on
Tuesday. According to Reuters,
a senator asked Kerry whether it was “basically true” that Syria’s
rebels had “become more infiltrated by al-Qaeda over time,” to which
Kerry responded, “No, that is actually basically not true. It’s
basically incorrect.” But the impression that Putin got from that
exchange was “not very pleasant for me,” the Russian President said.
Remember when Putin shared his thoughts on McCain?
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