During his current tour of Asia, Donald Trump threw the intelligence community under the bus and called former CIA director John Brennan, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and, former FBI director James Comey “political hacks.” All while embracing Vladimir Putin’s insistence that Russia did not interfere in the 2016 election, something that the CIA, NSA, and FBI determined happened. All while Special Investigator Robert Mueller’s probe continues to dig in on what Trump knew about Russia, and when.
John McCain, who has been vocally at odds with Trump throughout his presidency (despite voting in-line with Trump’s positions 84 percent of the time), released a statement about Trump’s statements on his government web page:
“President Trump today stated that he believed Vladimir Putin is being sincere when he denies Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and reiterated that he hopes to cooperate with Russia in Syria. There’s nothing ‘America First’ about taking the word of a KGB colonel over that of the American intelligence community. There’s no ‘principled realism’ in cooperating with Russia to prop up the murderous Assad regime, which remains the greatest obstacle to a political solution that would bring an end to the bloodshed in Syria.
Vladimir Putin does not have America’s interests at heart. To believe otherwise is not only naive but also places our national security at risk.”
It seems as if Trump’s convinced that Putin didn’t interfere in the 2016 election because he asked Putin multiple times, and to him, one can only assume that if one repeats something, it’s automatically true. After a meeting with Putin at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, Trump said of Putin: “He said he didn’t meddle. He said he didn’t meddle. I asked him again. You can only ask so many times. I just asked him again. He said he absolutely did not meddle in our election. He did not do what they are saying he did.”
(Via Business Insider)