A top Republican lawmaker said Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid is playing a “dangerous” kind of political game by suggesting that Donald Trump be denied intelligence briefings.
“It’s disturbing that Harry Reid is pressuring intelligence agencies to inject politics into their briefings. It is the duty of the intelligence community to present information and analysis to policymakers free from political bias,” Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said in a Thursday statement.
In an interview with The Huffington Post published Wednesday, Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., said the CIA and other intelligence agencies should not tell Trump “anything.”
“Fake it, pretend you’re doing a briefing, but you can’t give the guy any information,” Reid said of the Republican presidential nominee.
Cotton said Reid was “playing a dangerous game” by suggesting intelligence be withheld or falsified for Trump.
“The system of government Harry Reid is advocating — where the intelligence apparatus provides disinformation to one party and actively supports another — does indeed exist: in Putin’s Russia, not in the United States,” Cotton said.
Cotton’s mention of Russia comes amid speculation that Russian perpetrators hacked and released emails from the Democratic National Committee in an effort to give Trump a boost in his campaign. Though Trump has denied such claims, he said Wednesday that Russia probably already has Clinton’s deleted emails, and should return them to the U.S. if that’s the case.
Trump said Thursday he was just being sarcastic in order to make the point that Clinton successfully destroyed thousands of her emails that may have been government records.
But Democrats say it’s right to suspect that Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin are working together.
“We knew he liked Putin before this, but this is quite ridiculous,” Reid told The Huffington Post of Trump, adding later, “We know there are connections between Putin and Trump. How do we know that? He said so. And I’ve never heard Putin deny it. In fact, he has done just the opposite.”
Trump could have access to security briefings and classified intelligence as early as Friday, as will Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
