The Trump administration's weird explanation for withholding Russia sanctions

After plenty of chatter, we may be wading into the first real constitutional dispute of the Trump administration: On Monday night, the State Department announced it would not impose Russia sanctions that Congress overwhelmingly passed in mid-2017.

But its justification for doing so has some gaping logical holes.

Here's what the State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said:

“Today, we have informed Congress that this legislation and its implementation are deterring Russian defense sales. Since the enactment of the .?.?. legislation, we estimate that foreign governments have abandoned planned or announced purchases of several billion dollars in Russian defense acquisitions.”

A State Department official added that there was, in fact, no need for new sanctions “because the legislation is, in fact, serving as a deterrent.”

There are a few problems with this.

The first is that the legislation was meant as a punishment, not a deterrent. The Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act explicitly says at the top that it is “to provide congressional review and to counter aggression by the Governments of Iran, the Russian Federation, and North Korea, and for other purposes.” The law says it's about “countering” something, rather than preventing something. And while it lists Iran and North Korea, it was widely billed as a response to Russian interference in the 2016 election.

The second problem is that, even if it were a successful deterrent, it doesn't seem to be deterring the specific behavior that spurred the sanctions. Mere hours before the State Department issued this statement ahead of the deadline for imposing sanctions, CIA Director Mike Pompeo said that Russia hadn't really scaled back its election interference efforts.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/the-trump-administrations-weird-explanation-for-withholding-russia-sanctions/ar-BBItr5e?li=BBnbcA1&ocid=edgsp