Eli Lake, Columnist

State Department Had a Deal for Russia. It Was Spurned.

Before expelling hundreds of diplomats, Russia had a chance to reclaim its U.S. compounds.

September 1, 2017 at 6:58 PM UTC

Eli Lake is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering national security and foreign policy. He was the senior national security correspondent for the Daily Beast and covered national security and intelligence for the Washington Times, the New York Sun and UPI.

Appearances can be deceiving.
Photographer: Mikhail Klimentyev/TASS via Getty Images

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President Donald Trump has publicly praised President Vladimir Putin, and slammed a Congress-led deal to punish Russia with more sanctions. He even agreed, at a meeting with Putin this summer, to a U.S.-Russia dialogue on cyber issues, even though four U.S. intelligence agencies assessed that Russian military intelligence hacked leading Democrats and probed state voting systems.

Yet in spite of the president, the U.S. government has appeared to take a tough line on Russia. The latest example came Thursday, when the State Department announced it was closing three Russian diplomatic facilities in New York City, San Francisco and Washington, in response to the Kremlin’s dramatic decision last month to expel hundreds of American diplomatic workers.