Susan Rice: Trump Administration Is a ‘Clown Show’

Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” former Obama administration National Security Adviser Susan Rice called the Trump administration a “clown show.”

Host Andrea Mitchell asked, “On this Fourth of July weekend, the story of the Russian intelligence, the intelligence that Russia organized bounties to target American soldiers and coalition officers in Afghanistan, the president has now referred to this as a hoax. What message does that send to Vladimir Putin?”

Rice said, “The message to Vladimir Putin is you can kill American servicemen with absolute impunity. The president of the United States has demonstrated an absolutely callous disregard for the safety and security of American forces in the war zone, and there’s no explanation for this.”

She continued, “Look, I was national security adviser. I can tell the American people with certainty that we don’t ever or very, very rarely have 100% certainty, and that’s not what we’re aiming for. We are in this business of protecting the American people, and the servicemen and women have to do so often with imperfect information. What we just heard out of my successor, Mr. O’Brien and the press secretary, is a clown show. That’s not how intelligence works, and that’s not how the national security adviser and the top cabinet-level officials who were there to support the president are supposed to the behave. They are supposed to be on top of information like this. They are supposed to run it to the ground. It shouldn’t be months or years before we figure out whether something of this significance is actually something we take seriously. In fact, the intelligence community did take it seriously. We know that because it was written in the president’s daily briefing, the most important and exclusive product of the intelligence community. The president didn’t read it, and what’s extraordinary is that the people around him didn’t bring it to his attention, allegedly.”

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