MSNBC counterterrorism analyst Malcolm Nance suggested that President Trump is a Russian asset and has been for decades during an appearance on the network.
Nance, a former U.S. Navy intelligence officer, joined Morning Joe Tuesday morning to promote his book, The Plot To Betray America, which claims to reveal “exactly how Trump and his inner circle conspired, coordinated, communicated, and eventually strategized to commit the greatest act of treachery in the history of the United States.”
“In fact, it was Luke Harding at The Guardian who came out with the first indicators that Donald Trump had been under Russian intelligence surveillance for a very long time, as early as 1977 with his first wife Ivana. And Ivana was from the Czech Republic, which at that time was Czechoslovakia,” Nance claimed.
“Their intelligence agency, the STB, had her communications between the United States and the Czech Republic under surveillance, and they knew an enormous amount of information about Donald Trump between 1977 and the mid-80s” he added.
Nance then claimed Russia “became very interested” in Trump, who he insisted was interested in building Trump Tower Moscow and launching a presidential bid against former President George H.W. Bush at the time.
“And then in the mid-80s, Donald was starting to express an interest in building Trump Tower Moscow, but more importantly, there was word from her family that he was trying to consider running for president against George Herbert Walker Bush, who was, of course, the former Director of the CIA and the vice president of the United States. So Russia became very interested in him,” he said.
“They had ten years of collection, and then they brought him to Moscow for what he wanted, which was Trump Tower, but from that moment on, an enormous dossier of information was collected on him, and more importantly, how to exploit him. And his simple exploit, as we call it in the intelligence community is, he is avaricious to a fault,” Nance went on. “He wants money. They now in the modern Russian, with a former KGB director as president, they have money, they know how to exploit people, they know how to manipulate people, and they know how to buy people.”
Morning Joe co-host Willie Giest then brought up how, based on Nance’s reporting, the Russia intelligence community that was allegedly keeping track of Trump couldn’t have known that he’d go on to be president one day.
Nance concluded by saying, “Donald Trump sees the world only through Moscow’s point of view.”
MSNBC did not respond to a request for comment.
