Donald Trump won't call Putin a liar, but he has plenty of names for US intelligence officials
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On Wednesday evening, Donald Trump sat down for an interview with CBS anchor Jeff Glor, and while accounts of that interview have indicated that Trump expressed faith in US intelligence, the actual contents don’t agree. Throughout the interview, Trump shoDonald Trump won't call Putin a liar, but he has plenty of names for US intelligence officials
On Wednesday evening, Donald Trump sat down for an interview with CBS anchor Jeff Glor, and while accounts of that interview have indicated that Trump expressed faith in US intelligence, the actual contents don’t agree. Throughout the interview, Trump shows that he’s unable to call Vladimir Putin a liar, as he savages a long list of U.S. intelligence figures and indicates he only has faith in “his people.” Trump’s statements also include an open claim that there is a secret plot within the U.S. government—a mysterious “they”—working against Trump from somewhere in the deepest deep state to take him down. Far from walking back anything Trump said in Helsinki, his CBS interview did just what could be expected from Trump: It doubled down on his attack on intelligence officials, criticized reporters for reporting, and put forward again the idea that only someone who is a partisan for Trump can be trusted. Glor: But he denies it, so if you believe US intelligence agencies, is Putin lying to you? Trump: I don't want to get into whether or not he's lying. I can only say that I do have confidence in our intelligence agencies as currently constituted. It’s the “as currently configured” part of this that renders everything else moot. Because what Trump is actually saying is that he likes Dan Coats and Gina Haspel—though obviously not enough to say that Putin is lying. But his “belief” in U.S. intelligence agencies stops as soon as it passes the people he personally put in place. And that includes disregarding everything he was told by everyone up until … Tuesday? Wednesday? That part isn’t quite clear. What is clear is that Trump doesn’t trust anyone except Coats, because he rattles off a long list of people including James Comey, Andrew McCabe, John Brennan, James Clapper, Michael Hayden, and of course Peter Strzok and Lisa Page who get labeled as untrustworthy. And that’s before Trump divulges his belief in a secret cabal within the intelligence community that is out to get him. Trump: You know, Clapper wrote me a beautiful letter when I first went to office, and it was really nice. And then, all of a sudden, he's gone haywire because they got to him and they probably got him to say things that maybe he doesn't even mean. They got to Clapper. They got him to ‘say things’ he doesn’t mean. Only … who is they? Read more