Former
President Trump continued to question the death of
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny on Sunday, after being criticized for not explicitly blaming Russian President
Vladimir Putin for what many Western leaders believe was an assassination. Navalny last month, with little being known about his death until days later. President Biden and other Western leaders have said , though Trump has so far avoided saying the same. The former president spoke about Navalny’s death in a
Fox News “MediaBuzz” interview with Howard Kurtz, which aired Sunday. “I don’t know,” Trump answered when asked if Putin was responsible. “Perhaps. I mean, possibly, I could say probably. I don’t know. He’s a young man, so statistically, he’d be alive for a long time. You go by the insurance numbers, he’d be alive for another 40 years.” “Something happened that was unusual,” Trump said. When pressed by Kurtz on Navalny’s prior attempted assassination by poisoning, Trump again declined to be definitive. “I don’t know. You certainly can’t say for sure,” he said. “But certainly that would look like something very bad happened.” After Navalny died last month, Trump’s compared the jailed opposition leader’s experience to his own legal situation, calling a civil suit against him a “form of Navalny.” Those comments were thoroughly criticized by both
Democrats and
Republicans, with former Speaker
Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) calling them “You wonder, what does Putin have on that he always has to be beholden to him, his buddy in vileness?” Pelosi said. “It is so horrible you think, ‘No, somebody must have made this up. Not even
Donald Trump could go this far,’” she continued. “This statement should disqualify him from running for anything, much less president of the
United States.” Trump’s interview on Sunday comes on the last day of voting in Russian
elections, where Putin is expected to be elected to another six-year term in a non-competitive vote. At noon on Sunday, thousands of Russians at the same time in a protest effort against his regime.