NBC News intelligence and foreign policy analyst Malcolm Nance detailed why President Donald Trump's history of payoffs has created a national security nightmare during a Friday appearance on The Beat with Ari Melber.
Melber, who is also MSNBC's chief legal correspondent, played a 2016 clip of Trump denying he settled legal cases.
"I don't settle cases. You know what happens? When you start settling lawsuits, everybody sues you," Trump claimed on Morning Joe. "I don't get sued too often, because I don't settle cases, I win cases in court."
"Well, let's put that in common parlance, he settles to cover up past malfeasance," Nance explained. "This is a national security nightmare, it just sounds salacious because it involves a porn star."
"Here's one group of people that probably know all about this: the Kremlin," Nance predicted. "Whether this information was used as blackmail, we don't know."
"Who are the people he's been paying off and why he's being paying off so many people over the course of his life," Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin wondered.
"The whole question of national security comes into this, of this continuing pattern of him paying people off," Nance concluded. "These are not settlements, these are under the table payments."
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