This could be a critical week for the beginning of an end to the war in Ukraine. A ceasefire is on the table, and the one holdout is Russian President Vladimir Putin. I raised that and other key issues in an interview with President Donald Trump on Thursday evening.
The transcript below has been edited for brevity and clarity. You can catch the full interview Sunday morning on television, or at fullmeasure.news.
Attkisson: Is there anything new on the Russia development? Because I understand, probably by the minute, there are things happening.
Trump: I think it’s going well. I think it’s a tough situation that we’re in… It’s massive amounts of money, $350 billion we’ve spent on that. And we’re gonna try and do something about that. But more importantly, right now, you have a lot of people dying. You are losing probably 2,000 people a week in shooting soldiers, Russian and Ukrainian, and whatever we can do to stop it, we’re trying to do that.
Are you speaking to Putin in the last days or hours personally?
Well, I don’t wanna say it, but we are dealing with him and, I think, it’s going reasonably well. It’s a very complex situation, you know, it’s a bloody, terrible war. And I do think it’s going well. As you know, we have a ceasefire agreement with the Ukrainian group, and we are trying to get that with Russia too. And I think thus far it’s gone okay. We will know a little bit more on Monday, and that’ll be, hopefully, good.
I’m not understating the complexity of all this, but as a candidate, you said you would have this war settled in 24 hours.
Well, I was being a little bit sarcastic when I said that. I would — what I really mean is, I’d like to get it settled. And I think I’ll be successful.
What’s the plan if Putin doesn’t agree to a ceasefire?
Bad news for this world because so many people are dying. But I think he’s going to agree. I really do. I think I know him pretty well, and I think he’s gonna agree.
It’s been a tumultuous week, with confusion over tariffs, with the financial markets. A lot of regular people don’t understand tariffs and how they work.
They’re a beautiful thing — for us.
Can you explain, for people who aren’t really plugged into this, maybe with a specific product example, how we are supposedly getting ripped off by tariffs, and how it can be fixed and when we would see the benefits of it?
Well, we as a country have been ripped off for years and years, decades and decades. And you’ve covered it on your show; I’ve seen it… Canada’s a disaster for us. We lose close to $200 billion with Canada. Nobody did anything. Nobody says that with Canada, that they charge our farmers. Think of this — they have, for dairy products, some dairy products, 270% tariff. Nobody knows that. Nobody talks.
Okay, break that down to, like, common terms. So our farmers may have a product such as what, and we sell it to Canada.
So we wanna sell milk into Canada, and they throw a 270% price increase on the milk.
Which means we don’t have much of a market?
Which means we don’t sell milk in Canada. It’s almost — it’s called a monetary tariff.
There’s a lot of intrigue surrounding the release of the Epstein files, Martin Luther King files, John F. Kennedy files. Some current and former FBI agents are saying — some of them telling me that they feel the FBI establishment came out ahead in the standoff, sort of, with the New York FBI field office, over releasing the records. And your attorney general, Pam Bondi, demanding them but not getting all that she wanted. Is that process still on track? I think that’s one of the most-often questions I’ve been asked the last couple of days, to release these records on Epstein, MLK and JFK.
Well, Pam Bondi’s done a phenomenal job in every respect. And there could have been some holdback. I haven’t heard too much about it, but they could — but the bottom line is the records are getting out. The Kennedy records are getting out. Those are the ones they really wanted to see the most were the Kennedy’s. And, during my administration, as you know, I released a lot of them. But then a lot of people started coming in — people that I respected, people that worked for the administration, asked me not to release the rest.
Did they say why?
And I respected that. They gave me certain reasons, but I respected that. And I did say, I must tell you, I said that I probably wish I did release the whole thing because — I have no idea what’s in there. But since then they found, and we found, 2,000 more documents on Kennedy. And the one they want most is Kennedy. And it’s gonna be released. It’s moving along, and it’s moving along pretty rapidly.
Weeks maybe?
I would say weeks, yeah.
“Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson” airs at 10 a.m. Sunday, WJLA (Channel 7) and WBFF (Channel 45).
