On Monday night, The Washington Post ran a story claiming that the president leaked classified intel to the Russians during a recent White House meeting with them, prompting Trump and his surrogates to thoroughly deny these accusations. Not long after those denials, Trump went into a Twitter tirade about how he shared information on terrorism with them and claimed he absolutely had the right to do that. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins discusses this.
Transcript of the above video:
Yesterday evening the Washington Post published a story that said that Donald Trump revealed classified information last week during a meeting in the Oval Office with officials from Russia. Now, immediately the Trump team went out in the media and said that this story is absolutely false, not true. “I was in the room and it didn’t happen,” that is what Donald Trump’s surrogates said on national media. They said it to the press. These stories went wild. Trump supporters on Twitter were attacking Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats saying, “You guys are liars. You’re believing the fake news. This never happened,” and then Tuesday morning, Donald Trump does what he always does and gets on Twitter and he says, “Look, I was just trying to share information with them about ISIS, and terrorism, and airline safety, which I have the absolute right to do,” those were his exact words there.
After his administration comes out denying everything that the Washington Post reported, Donald Trump essentially came out and admitted that he did this. Now, he didn’t necessarily say in his tweets that he divulged classified information, but he did make it very clear that, “Yeah, I shared information. I have the right to do that. I’m president and you’re not. Deal with it,” after his team already went to bat and lied for him to the media. Now, I know there’s a lot of divides right now in this country, even among conservatives, among liberals, about whether or not this whole Russia thing actually happened, if it’s a big deal. Do we take it seriously, or are they trying to drum up a new Cold War? But at this point, after the firing of Comey last week, after the revelations that he could possibly be sharing classified information with them the day after firing Comey, you got to admit everything seems a little fishy at this point. Something’s not right. This is not normal behavior for a sitting president. Everybody, I think at this point, if you’re looking at this rationally, has to admit something’s not right here.
Donald Trump consistently denies that he has any kind of contact, any kind of conflict of interest, and then immediately turns around and does something like this, potentially divulging classified information that could have massive implications for US national security as well as the security of US agents abroad. He had no regard for those people whatsoever, the people he could be putting in harm’s way. He just wanted to brag about how great our intelligence was and how great our military is. Look at all this stuff that I know. That’s basically what happened at this meeting. He didn’t do this maliciously. He did it because he’s an arrogant idiot. He wanted to show how great the US was and how great the US is running under him. He wanted to brag about something, and unfortunately for this idiot the only thing he has to brag about is classified information, because god knows he can’t brag about his poll numbers. He can’t brag about any of his accomplishments because he has none, so he wanted to brag about how we’re taking on ISIS, essentially policies that are leftover from Barack Obama.
The bottom line is this. Donald Trump had his people go out the night immediately following the Washington Post story and lie to us, and then he turns around the next morning, completely contradicts everything they said, and says, “Yeah, I did it and I have the right to do it.” You know, the Democrats and even actually a lot of sitting Republicans at this point are getting tired of this. There were tweets last night from Democratic congresspeople saying that, “You know what? It’s time for impeachment to start,” and I at this point, I don’t think that that’s too far off. We will see some form of meaningful impeachment process begin probably within the next few months. Will it be successful? Who knows, but I can promise you after this latest revelation, after all of the BS we’ve been through in this Trump Administration’s first four months, impeachment proceedings are not far off at this point.
