Andrew McCabe says Trump-Putin interactions ‘raise questions’, as Harris says Putin would eat Trump ‘for lunch’

Andrew McCabe says Trump-Putin interactions ‘raise questions’, as Harris says Putin would eat Trump ‘for lunch’

Donald Trump can be seen as a Russian asset, though not in the traditional sense of an active agent or a recruited resource, an ex-FBI deputy director who worked under the former US president said.

Asked on a podcast if he thought it possible Trump was a Russian asset, Andrew McCabe, who Trump fired as FBI deputy director in 2018, said: “I do, I do.”

He added: “I don’t know that I would characterize it as [an] active, recruited, knowing asset in the way that people in the intelligence community think of that term. But I do think that Donald Trump has given us many reasons to question his approach to the Russia problem in the United States, and I think his approach to interacting with Vladimir Putin, be it phone calls, face-to-face meetings, the things that he has said in public about Putin, all raise significant questions.”

…

Speaking to One Decision, McCabe said: “You have to have some very serious questions about, why is it that Donald Trump … has this fawning sort of admiration for Vladimir Putin in a way that no other American president, Republican or Democrat, ever has.

  • Dagwood222@lemm.ee
    333·
    3 months ago

    Stalin used to use the term ‘useful idiots’ for Westerners who would help advance his interests. Sometimes they were sincere progressives who thought that Stalin was a trusted ally, and others were blatant opportunists.

    Or as Khrushchev said, ‘when the time comes to hang the West an American businessman will sell us the rope.’

    https://www.wired.com/story/if-trump-is-laundering-russian-money-heres-how-it-works/#:~:text=The payments appear to mirror suspicious

    https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/12/21/how-russian-money-helped-save-trumps-business/#:~:text=“There have long been credible allegations

      • Emotet@slrpnk.net
        13·
        3 months ago

        Yup. A variation of the quote (basically capitalists instead of American businessmen) is commonly attributed to Lenin instead of Khrushchev. But that, too, can’t be verified and is said to be fake.

          • Diva (she/her)
            22·
            3 months ago

            I feel like it’s the case for most idioms attributed to famous people

            • Juice@midwest.social
              2·
              3 months ago

              I don’t know there are these ideas get stuck in our head and we just assume they are true for some reason. This “the capitalist will sell us the rope we will use to hang him” is prolific, its everywhere and one has to wonder why. There’s no truth in it. People would attribute it to Marx too but Marx would never say that. I think its a cultural relic that serves to make communism sound badass and scary. But hanging capitalists will not put the world on the path to socialism, if anything the opposite must be true.

              • Diva (she/her)
                41·
                3 months ago

                I always read it metaphorical in terms of ‘they make available the resources with which to undermine them’

                • Juice@midwest.social
                  2·
                  3 months ago

                  Well Marx already has the formulation of “capitalism creates its own gravediggers” which is his idea that the material conditions created by capitalism create individuals who are committed to overthrow it, and so the challenge historically is how to get these people all pulling the same correct direction, and once you do, how do you keep it from breaking apart or giving into reformism or whatever.

                  But there’s something about the way it is framed? Those of us who want to see capitalism overthrown are able to read something more abstract into it, but the metaphor persists more or less intact. The brutality of it never gives way to the truth that we read into it. So in that way when we accept the truth there is violence that hitches a ride in our reasoning. How far are we then from Bordiga’s formulation of “Socialism and Barbarism”? Idk. Everyone knows that quote, but people don’t know about Matewan, or the American Strike waves of 1932, or Burkina Faso, or Pancho Villa.

                  In short, is what we are learning and repeating educational in a revolutionary way? After all, as Paulo Friere said, “When education isn’t liberating it is the dream of the oppressed to become the oppressor.”