Rubio: US-Russia Lawmaker Dialogue Idea ‘Interesting’ But Requires Clear Goals

Former presidential candidate Marco Rubio claims that dialogue between US and Russian lawmakers sounds like an interesting idea but requires clear goals and assurances that meetings will be productive.

WASHINGTON (Sputnik), Andrew Feinberg — Dialogue between US and Russian lawmakers sounds like an interesting idea but requires clear goals and assurances that meetings will be productive, Senate Foreign Relations Committee member and former presidential candidate Marco Rubio told Sputnik.

On Tuesday, Chairman of the Russian upper house's foreign affairs committee Konstantin Kosachev said that before the US presidential election an agreement was almost reached with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to hold regular meetings between the two legislative bodies.

"It’s an interesting idea, but there would have to be a clear objective and I would have to be convinced that it was going to be productive," Rubio stated on Thursday.

Rubio said a challenge to conducting any sort of dialogue between the Senate and the Russian upper house would be that he is not sure that Russian lawmakers would have the ability to act independently of the decisions of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

In 2016, then-President Barack Obama accused Moscow of interfering in the US presidential election by hacking Democratic National Committee (DNC) servers. Russian officials have repeatedly refuted the allegations as absurd baseless attempts to distract from domestic issues.