Susan Rice sounds fed up with the Trump administration’s brazen incompetence and continued capitulation to foreign leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin. Rice served in the Obama administration as the president’s national security adviser, and this weekend during Meet the Press, she harshly condemned the current president and his allies over reports indicating that the Trump team did nothing in response to learning about a possible Russian plot to pay Afghan militants to kill American soldiers.
In the weeks after information about the situation was included in the President’s Daily Brief, Trump had six phone calls with Putin, and he publicly advocated for the return of Putin to the G7 group of world leaders. Nowhere in there is any kind of reaction against Russia for their alleged plot to have American soldiers killed.
Rice called those around the president “cowards” for apparently refusing to follow through on any kind of response against Russia, and she insisted that Trump himself “is doing our arch adversary’s bidding, it would seem.” She commented:
‘It makes no sense. None of this adds up, and if, in fact, the president is surrounded by such cowards and incompetents, that even when he’s trying to invite Putin into the G7 and has these six phone calls, nobody has the guts to say to the President of the United States: Mr. President, we still, I wanna remind you, have credible intelligence that the Russians are trying to kill U.S. servicemen and women in Afghanistan — this is not the time to be handing Putin an olive branch. This is the time to be working up options to punish him, and yet, that’s not what happened.’
Trump has been infamously chummy with Putin, which culminated in a recent push from the president for Putin to rejoin the G7 group of world leaders, which would make it the G8. He’d originally been kicked out after Russia took over the Crimean peninsula.
Rice continued:
‘This is really extraordinary. We have a president who is doing our arch adversary’s bidding, it would seem, and he’s surrounded by sycophants and weaklings who aren’t doing their jobs, who don’t have the confidence in themselves and in the mission that they are to carry out to bring the president the tough messages that he needs to hear. That’s the job of the national security adviser. It’s not an easy job. Often, you have to walk in and tell the president of the United States what he doesn’t wanna hear and then own responsibility for bringing back to the president options for dealing with that bad news. That’s the essence of the job.’
Watch her comments below:
WATCH: "We have a president who is doing our arch adversary's bidding. … And he is surrounded by sycophants and weaklings." — @AmbassadorRice on the White House's claim that President Trump didn't know about Russian bounties on American heads. #MTP #IfItsSunday pic.twitter.com/7ql6Wi82FH
— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) July 5, 2020
Trump has responded to the news of possible Russian bounties on American troops by insisting that the plot may have been made up by the media to make him look bad.
On Twitter recently, Trump dubiously claimed:
‘Intel just reported to me that they did not find this info credible, and therefore did not report it to me or @VP . Possibly another fabricated Russia Hoax, maybe by the Fake News @nytimesbooks , wanting to make Republicans look bad!!!’
There’s no evidence supporting his conspiracy that the media might have made up the plot.
Intel just reported to me that they did not find this info credible, and therefore did not report it to me or @VP. Possibly another fabricated Russia Hoax, maybe by the Fake News @nytimesbooks, wanting to make Republicans look bad!!! https://t.co/cowOmP7T1S
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 29, 2020
