Somehow the "independent fact-checker" don't get around to crazy statements like "President Trump is a Russian asset." When Hillary suggested Tulsi Gabbard was a Russian asset, PolitiFact wouldn't rule it was "False."
On Tuesday's Morning Joe program MSNBC pundit Malcolm Nance claimed that the GOP occupant of the White House was “compromised” by Russia as far back as 1977.
Instead of questioning the unlikely accusation, co-host Willie Geist agreed with the charge that Trump had gone from being a “useful idiot” to an “unwitting asset” for Russian President Vladimir Putin, who was actually described by the pundit as a “super-villain.”
NANCE: I'm not a journalist. I’m a former intelligence operator. We see things differently. We can predict activities that must be in place for an event to occur. So if you hack the DNC and you use Russian military intelligence, you’re trying to replicate Watergate, and at that time, the nominee was Donald Trump. He was very close to Russia, therefore, he was being supported by Russia and expected to benefit from Russia’s efforts.”
As you might expect, the former U.S. Navy intelligence officer also used his appearance to promote his new 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.”
Nance also stated that “we had already seen dozens of attempts by Russian military intelligence to hack the White House, the Pentagon and others,” so Trump’s involvement “immediately set off a chain of activities in my brain based on Russian intelligence activities I had seen in the Cold War.”
As if that claim wasn’t crazy enough, the pundit asserted that the President had been compromised “as early as 1977” because his first wife, Ivana, was born in Czechoslovakia, “which was part of the Eastern Bloc.”
“And then, in the mid-’80s, Donald was starting to express an interest in building Trump Tower Moscow,” Nance claimed, and “Russia became very interested in him” while compiling “an enormous dossier of information” that revealed “how to exploit him.”
“He is avaricious to a fault. He wants money,” the analyst asserted.
Geist then joined the fray when he asserted:
Putin and Russia never could have dreamed in the 1980s when they were looking at him as just an asset, maybe a useful asset, that he would elevate to become the President of the United States, the best possible asset they could have.
So at what point did they say: “Okay, this guy is a serious candidate: We need to start using him and to use information that we have to bring him in close and make sure he wins the election?”
Nance responded by labeling Putin a “super-villain” and claimed that when the Russian president “was a baby spy … in East Germany, his job was to manipulate people. It was to turn people into traitors.”
The pundit next asserted that by 2014, Donald Trump “was making enormous quantities of money from the Russian oligarchy, but that is when ... it became very clear to the Russians this man could go from a useful idiot ... to an unwitting asset, where he’s being used and he doesn’t know it.”
At that point, Nance claimed, the Russians “put a set of rose-colored glasses on his face” so Trump “sees the world only through Moscow’s point of view because he knows that is where an enormous quantity of money that he cannot access exists and will be made available to him.”
Judging from the analyst's bizarre leaps of logic regarding President Trump, he is definitely not a journalist. Perhaps he should concentrate on finding another career instead.
