Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, on CBS News’ “Face the Nation” on Oct. 26, attacked host Margaret Brennan for even quoting the “Russian propagandist” Kirill Dmitriev. Dmitriev was finishing up three days of meetings in Washington, centered around his briefings to White House representatives.
Asked about Dmitriev’s dismissal of the effectiveness of more sanctions on Russia, Bessent replied: “Well, I think Russia is going to feel the pain immediately. I can tell you that we’ve already seen India has done a complete halt of Russian oil purchases. Many of the Chinese refineries have stopped.”
He went from his own exaggerations and into an attack against Brennan: “And Margaret, are you really going to … publish what a Russian propagandist says? I mean, what else is he going to say? That ‘oh, it’s going to be terrible, and it’s going to bring Putin to the table.’ Of course—the Russian economy is a wartime economy. Growth is virtually zero. Inflation, I believe, is over 20%, and everything we do is going to bring Putin to the table….”
Brennan attempted to calm matters, explaining that, “just to be clear, Dmitriev is in the United States because sanctions were lifted on him to conduct meetings here, including with President Trump’s envoy, Steve Witkoff. When you say he’s a propagandist, do you mean that we shouldn’t listen to anything he says?”
Bessent, as indicated by the transcript, became no calmer and retorted: “I—what do you—what do you think is going to happen to him if he goes back home and says the— good lord. What if he had said on TV, ‘this is terrible, President Trump just did the right thing’?”
He then asserted his view on reality: “This is a maximum pressure campaign that’s going to work. Margaret, what’s he going to say? Of course, he’s going to say this.... So again, President Trump was criticized for not doing enough. He takes his bold maneuver, and then you’re quoting a Russian propagandist.”
A senior Republican congressional aide told the Kyiv Post that Bessent calling Dmitriev a “Russian propagandist” was a “welcome move.” As the Ukrainian daily wrote: “The aide stressed that Moscow’s brazen lies ‘have strangely been allowed to fly publicly for too long’ and it’s ‘time to call a spade a spade.’”
Bill Browder, one of the main financial looters of the post-Soviet Russian economy, offered: “The fact that Putin dispatched Kirill Dmitriev to Washington within minutes of the United States sanctioning Lukoil and Rosneft shows just how rattled Putin is.” Browder—who, after Britain’s King Charles last year knighted him for decades of opposing Putin, is now “Knight Commander of the Order of St. Michael and St. George, Sir William Browder.” His grandfather Earl Browder, a former head of the Communist Party USA, would be proud.
