MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell accused President Trump of being a “Russian operative.”
Reacting to reports that the House Intelligence Committee was told last week by U.S. intelligence officials that Russia is attempting to interfere in the 2020 election to get Trump reelected, O’Donnell also noted the timing, as Trump appointed Richard Grenell, the U.S. ambassador to Germany and a close ally, to be acting director of national intelligence on Wednesday.
“The president is a Russian operative,” O’Donnell said on his show Thursday evening. “That sounds like the description of a bad Hollywood screenplay, but it is real, and it is Vladimir Putin’s greatest achievement, decades after America’s victory in the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the president of the United States is now helping the president of Russia help the president of the United States to get reelected so that the president of Russia will have four more years of the president of the United States who he wants in the Oval Office.”
O’Donnell called it a “shocking” revelation, one that led him to label the Trump administration as the “Trump-Putin regime.” He said the news Russia wants Trump to win reelection explains his decision to appoint Grenell to oversee the Intelligence Community.
“Donald Trump has outdone himself by appointing one of the most ridiculous incompetent stooges in the Trump administration to be nothing less than the acting director of national intelligence,” O’Donnell said, noting Grenell’s lack of intelligence experience.
O’Donnell said Trump would have nominated his now-former acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, “until Vladimir Putin showed Donald Trump that he needed an even more incompetent director of national intelligence because Vladimir Putin is working hard to reelect his favorite president of the United States in history.”
Grenell says he will only serve in an acting capacity and will not be named as Trump’s nominee to take on the DNI role permanently.
