Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden claims Russian President Vladimir Putin is President Trump’s favorite person.
“There’s no one in this world that [Trump] loves more than the Russian president,” Snowden said during an interview with The Intercept for a podcast published Friday.
Snowden was granted asylum in Russia back in 2013 after he leaked secret information from the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs and has been there ever since. Offering his insight into special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election as well as possible collusion between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign, Snowden said people are “asking for too much” when hoping for a “smoking gun against Trump.”
“’Yes! Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, in the hotel room with the piss tape!’ You know that’s not how the world works; life is not that simple,” he said, referencing the largely unverified dossier that alleged Trump took part in a kinky sex scene with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel in 2013.
Casting doubt on the collusion narrative espoused by Trump’s critics, Snowden opined that Trump is not the understated type of person Putin would want to coordinate with secretly.
“To be honest, everyone who has heard Trump speak for three minutes knows he’s a wrecking ball,” he said. “This does not sound like the kind of person that you would want to engage in some kind of complicated Manchurian Candidate, when, you know, the guy can’t even remember what he was going to say at the end of a sentence.”
Instead, Snowden suggested that Putin would probably want to “cooperate” with Trump to “achieve an advantage.”
Trump’s legal team is currently in negotiations with Mueller’s team to achieve a potential sit-down interview with the president as part of the Russia investigation.
