Senators Balk at Tillerson Over Putin Before He’s Nominated
Senators signaled that President-elect Donald Trump’s leading choice for secretary of state, Exxon Mobil Corp. chief Rex Tillerson, could have trouble winning confirmation because of his ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“Being a ‘friend of Vladimir’ is not an attribute I am hoping for from a #SecretaryOfState,” Florida Republican Marco Rubio, who serves on the Foreign Relations Committee that would consider Tillerson’s nomination, said Sunday in a Twitter post signed with his initials.
Criticism from Republicans such as Rubio and Senator John McCain as well as key Democrats suggest that nominating the Exxon chairman and chief executive officer could become a messy distraction for the new president. It also would become a proxy fight over Trump’s position that Putin is an effective leader with whom he can reach agreements, a stance widely unpopular among lawmakers in both parties.
In what may be a message that he’s still evaluating reaction to the choice, Trump said on Twitter on Sunday, “Whether I choose him or not for ‘State’- Rex Tillerson, the Chairman & CEO of ExxonMobil, is a world class player and dealmaker.
Stay tuned!”
[He still thinks he's producing a reality show; more interested in keeping "the audience" engaged in the "performance" than he is in the actual real-world impacts of his decisions. 
]
Relations between the U.S. and Russia have ebbed since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and intervention in Syria’s civil war, and Putin has expressed hope that Trump will be a more sympathetic ear in the White House than President Barack Obama, whose relationship with the Russian leader is frosty.
“I don’t know what Mr. Tillerson’s relationship with Vladimir Putin was, but I’ll tell you it is a matter of concern to me,” McCain, an Arizona Republican who’s chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said on Fox News on Saturday. “You want to give the president of the United States the benefit of the doubt because the people have spoken. But Vladimir Putin is a thug, a bully and a murderer, and anybody else who describes him as anything else is lying.” 
Tillerson’s ties to Putin date back to 1999, when the pair met on Sakhalin Island in Russia’s Far East. He was awarded Russia’s Order of Friendship, a high civilian honor given to distinguished foreign nationals. As recently as 2015 he visited with officials in Putin’s inner circle. That connection could make him a useful bridge between the Russian leader and Trump in his efforts to improve U.S. relations with Moscow.
But Stephen Sestanovich, a former U.S. ambassador-at-large for the former Soviet Union, said it would be impossible for Tillerson to be effective, given his connections to Exxon and Putin.
“This is a shocking choice: If Tillerson has to recuse himself from Russia policy, he can’t do his job; if he doesn’t recuse himself, he creates the appearance of deep conflict of interest, even corruption,” Sestanovich, the George F. Kennan Senior Fellow for Russian and Eurasian Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, said in an e-mail. “This is a god-awful position for a secretary of state to be in.”
In a sign that he’d try to provide a receptive confirmation hearing for Tillerson, Corker of Tennessee said in a tweet on Saturday, “If it is Rex Tillerson, he is a very impressive individual.”
But it would take only one Republican, such as Rubio, joining all of the Foreign Relations Committee’s Democrats to block a Tillerson nomination in the committee. The nomination could be taken to the Senate floor despite a rejection in the committee, but that would be an unprecedented move for a Cabinet post.
Tensions over Trump’s views on Russia have been exacerbated by the president-elect’s continuing rejection of findings by U.S. intelligence agencies
[17 agencies] that Russia was behind the hacking during the presidential campaign that led to extensive leaks of Democrats’ e-mails.
While the initial finding was that Russia’s goal was to undermine confidence in the U.S. political process, the Washington Post reported on Friday that the CIA had told senators in classified briefings that Putin’s government had gone further -- actively seeking to help Trump win election.
Trump’s transition team belittled the U.S. intelligence community in a statement on the Post report late Friday that also exaggerated Trump’s margin of victory.
