(CNSNews.com) – Following the White House release of a memo on President Trump’s July 25 phone conversation with his Ukrainian counterpart, Russia’s foreign ministry spokeswoman said Wednesday Democratic leaders were making the U.S. the “laughing stock of the world.” She also suggested mockingly which confidential U.S. documents should be made public next.
“I’ve read the transcript of the telephone conversation between Trump and [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky, which Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi found reason enough to launch a procedure of impeachment against her president,” spokeswoman Maria Zakharova wrote on her Facebook account, according to the TASS news agency.
“Is it the U.S. Democrats’ job to make their country a laughing stock of the world?” she asked, then added that that is “precisely what Mrs. Pelosi has done.”
Trump on Wednesday released a declassified memo featuring dialogue from the Trump-Zelensky conversation, in which Trump asked the Ukrainian leader to look into corruption claims involving former Vice President Joe Biden’s son.
The memo does not bear out allegations that Trump applied pressure on Zelensky, but Democrats accuse the president of abusing his powers and seeking a foreign government’s help to undermine Biden, who is running for his party’s 2020 presidential nomination.
In her sardonic posting, Zakharova noted that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange had made public not one but thousands of documents, and yet Democrats had been offended by him and “began to chase him around the world.”
(Assange has been indicted in the U.S. on 18 counts relating to mass leaks of classified information. He is in custody in Britain, and the U.S. is seeking his extradition.)
“We want more [documents released]!” Zakharova wrote. “May they now publish transcripts of their conversations with NATO partners and between each other. Accounts of meetings behind closed doors at the offices of the CIA, the FBI and the Pentagon will be highly welcome. Anything goes!”
And if the documents released by WikiLeaks over the last ten years were made public, and posted on the White House and U.S. Congress websites, she added, “Then we’ll see who is really responsible for the law-breaking Nancy Pelosi talked so much about yesterday, her voice trembling with emotion.”
In other reaction from Moscow Konstantin Kosachev, chairman of the Russian equivalent of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said there was little to see from the memo of the Trump-Zelensky conversation, describing the dialogue as “empty, albeit anti-Russian.”
“Only Americans obsessed with the upcoming elections will probably extract something from it for their own purposes,” Kosachev, an ally of President Vladimir Putin, wrote on Facebook.
Lawmaker Alexei Pushkov, a former chairman of the lower house international affairs committee, said on Twitter the Democrats were trying to divert attention away from Biden.
“For the Democrats, the hysteria about Trump’s ‘pressure’ on Zelensky, which Zelensky himself refutes, is not only an escalation of passions needed to start impeachment, but also a way to divert focus from Biden,” he tweeted.
Speaking alongside Trump when the two met in New York on Wednesday, Zelensky said when asked whether he had been pressured by Trump during the phone call to investigate Biden, “Nobody pushed – pushed me.”
On his arrival in New York earlier this week, Zelensky was asked by Russian reporters whether he had come under “pressure” from the American president.
“No one is able to put pressure on me, since I am the president of an independent country,” state-owned Russia 24 news channel quoted him as saying in reply.
“The only person in the world who has this power is my six-year-old son,” added Zelensky, an actor and comedian with no political experience who was elected by a landslide last April.