Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said Monday that all evidence points to the idea that Donald Trump is being played by the Kremlin, and that the Russians are using an unwitting GOP nominee for their own gain.
“There is a great term the Soviets used to use: ‘somebody being a useful idiot,'” Albright, who is now a major supporter of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell. “I think that Trump falls into that category of people that are manipulated also by the Russians and the Russians are trying to interfere in our democracy because they don’t have one themselves.”
She continued, and said that in all her experiences dealing with foreign countries, Russia’s alleged involvement in the recent email hacking of the Democratic National Committee and Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, is simply “stunning.”
Albright also said Trump is making matters worse by seemingly encouraging the hackings, like when he suggested in July that the Russians probably have Clinton’s 33,000 deleted State Department emails and that they would “probably be rewarded mightily by our press” if they released them.
“I have never seen a mind meld of this kind between the Russian leadership and a candidate for the presidency of the United States,” she said Monday. “Trump was briefed in his intelligence briefings about what the Russians are doing and he is playing their game instead of being concerned about America’s democratic system.”
This is neither the first time that Albright has criticized Trump for his comments on the hackings, nor is she the only former member of the intelligence community to suggest the GOP nominee is being played by the Kremlin.
“I spent … a third of a century at the agency. And in that time, it was my job to look at foreign leaders and to assess them, assess their intentions, their capabilities, their motivations, their interest in working with the U.S. or not, etcetera, etcetera,” Former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell said in a conference call with reporters last month.
“And if I sort of turned that analytical spotlight on Donald Trump, I would tell you that his No. 1 interest, the thing he cares about the most, is not the United States of America. It is Donald Trump. He cares more about himself than he does about anything else, including his nation,” he said.
Albright, who was also on that call, added to Morrell’s comments, “[Trump] is a gift to Putin, and now we can see that Putin is a gift to him.”
The director of national intelligence, James Clapper Jr., and the Department of Homeland Security said earlier this year in a statement that the email hacks, which have been published by WikiLeaks, appear to be part of a larger, Russian-led effort to “interfere with the U.S. election process.”
“We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities,” the statement said.
