MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace posited that it’s still an “open question” as to whether President Trump is secretly working for Russia.
Wallace made the speculative claim on her show Deadline: White House on Friday during a conversation with former Time magazine Managing Editor Rick Stengel and Associated Press White House reporter Jonathan Lemire.
They were discussing the bombshell report from the Atlantic, which has been refuted by a number of White House staffers on the record, that Trump bashed and demeaned fallen and wounded soldiers while he was on an overseas trip in 2018. Stengel asked whether Trump’s supposed comments were resonating with some parts of the country.
“What I wonder when I hear Donald Trump […] calling people in the military and vets and people who are captured ‘suckers’ or ‘losers,’ how many other Americans think that? How many other Americans think, ‘Yeah, he’s got the right idea about things,'” he said. “Those guys are suckers. That’s what scares me going up to Nov. 3. Are people paying attention to this? Is he tapping into something that we don’t understand? That’s my worry, and I would love to hear what people think about that.”
Wallace, as she turned the question over to Lemire, went on a tangent about Trump’s apparent connections to Russia.
“The acting director of the FBI thought there was probable cause to look at whether or not he was a Russian agent, and days after he opened that investigation, that was Andy McCabe, Rod Rosenstein killed it. We learned that in [New York Times’s reporter] Mike Schmidt’s new book,” she said. “And I think there’s an excerpt in the Atlantic, as well, from Peter Strzok’s new book, where he also makes the same point — that the counterintelligence investigation he opened was, to his knowledge, never pursued. So, there is an open question, not opened by anyone in the media questioned or by his critics, but by career law enforcement officials at the FBI who thought there was probable cause to investigate whether or not he was a Russian agent.”
The Trump presidency has been plagued with alleged ties to Russia dating back to before it even began. Amid allegations that the two parties colluded to win the election, the FBI began investigating, which ultimately led to Robert Mueller’s probe. The special counsel’s investigation found that Russia had meddled in the 2016 election, and to the benefit of Trump, but that there was no evidence to support conspiracy between the two parties.
Former FBI official Peter Strzok, who worked on the investigation and later became a metaphorical punching bag for the president when he would deride the investigation, is set to release a book later in September that will argue that Trump has been “compromised” by Russia.
