‘Do not congratulate’: Trump warned against Putin call

AN EMBARRASSING note shows the US President Donald Trump was given very clear instructions after Vladimir Putin won re-election.

DONALD Trump was warned praising Vladimir Putin for his re-election, it has emerged after an embarrassing note was leaked reading: “DO NOT CONGRATULATE”.

The White House is facing another humiliation after the publication of the President’s prepared notes for the call.

Mr Trump’s shock decision to congratulate the Russian leader for his landslide win was slammed after controversy surrounding Mr Putin’s alleged tampering with the results and arrests of his opponents.

The hunt is now underway for the person who leaked the document, while politicians warned Russia remains a risk in terms of meddling with November’s midterms, after it was sanctioned for meddling in the 2016 election.

“The threat of interference remains,” Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen told a hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee on election security.

“We recognise that the 2018 midterm, and future elections, are clearly potential targets for Russian hacking attempts,” she said.

Democratic Senator Mark Warner told the hearing it was “clear that 2016 will not be the last attempt” to meddle by Russia, calling Mr Trump out for his repeated failure to tackle the subject with Mr Putin.

Donald Trump was advised not to congratulate Russian President Vladimir Putinon his election win in a very firm note. Picture: AP Photo/Evan Vucci

“The fact that the president did not even bring up the topic of our election security when he called Vladimir Putin to congratulate him on his ‘victory’ in a pre-cooked election, is extremely troubling,” he said.

The Washington Post and others reported that aides explicitly advised Mr Trump to condemn the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain.

According to accounts from the White House and the Kremlin, the President did neither. The leak of such sensitive information about Oval Office deliberations points to deep frustration within the White House about the former businessman’s erratic approach.

Only individuals at the very highest levels of the administration would have known about the details of the call.

The White House said in a statement it is a “fireable offence and likely illegal” to leak Mr Trump’s briefing papers to the press.

The news comes with the President remains under pressure both from porn star Stormy Daniels, who is fighting to have a nondisclosure agreement lifted, and over the collection of Facebook data to help him win the election.

A former employee of political consulting company Cambridge Analytica says he helped Mr Trump win the 2016 presidential election.

Canadian Chris Wylie said his team spoke to Americans in focus groups to identify deep-seated concerns between 2013 and 2015. Then they tested ways to tap into those fears through social media. The slogans they developed later became the catchphrases of the Trump campaign, he says.

Wylie is at the centre of allegations that Cambridge Analytica improperly used data from more than 50 million Facebook users to identify voters who might be sympathetic to Mr Trump’s message and target them with social media messages.

— With wires