Former Trump National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster said President Donald Trump was “aiding and abetting” Vladimir Putin by not directly calling out Russia’s election interference on Thursday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Live.”
McMaster said, “This sustained campaign of disruption, disinformation, and denial, is aided by any leader who doesn’t acknowledge it. This is why, I think, the president has to be much stronger in condemning this effort to really reduce our confidence in who we are as Americans. You know, I don’t think the Russians really care, Hallie who wins the election, as long as we doubt the result, and as long as they’re able to continue to polarize us on contentious issues. they spend about 80% of their effort dividing us further on issues of race, for example, and then also on gun control or immigration, and so we have to be cognizant of this, and we need our leaders to help pull the curtain back on it, not aid and abet Putin by, you know, not calling him out on it, or talking about other nations that are disrupting us, which they are, but Russia is the primary problem in the area.”
Jackson asked, “Let’s call a spade a spade, you’re talking about leaders who are not calling out Russia, that is President Trump. you’re talking about leaders who are trying to sow doubt in election integrity, and David Sanger of the Times makes the extraordinary argument that the most direct threat to the electoral process now comes from the president of the United States himself writing that he, Donald Trump, is going beyond anything Vladimir Putin could have imagined. Do you agree, sir, is the president right now perhaps the biggest threat to our election integrity?”
McMaster said, “I agree that he is aiding and abetting Putin’s efforts by not being direct about this. Right? By not just calling out Putin for what he’s doing. You know, Putin gets away with, I mean, literally murder or attempted murder with Navalny as we’ve seen recently because people don’t call him out on it. And so they are able to continue with this kind of fire hose of falsehood, to sow these conspiracy theories and we just can’t be our own worst enemies. So what the president does, I think, and I described this in ‘Battlegrounds,’ he conflates three separate questions, right, is Russia meddling in the election or did they meddle in the 2016 election? Heck, yes, of course, they did. The second is, did they care who won? I think you can debate that. I think they were actually set up like most people expected for a Hillary Clinton victory, and they had a whole disinformation campaign ready to go to say that the election was rigged and that’s why — that’s what Trump didn’t win the 2016 election. And then, of course, the third question is, if they meddled, you know, did they have an effect on the result? I mean, we’ll never know that.”
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