Former FBI special agent Clint Watts on Monday told MSNBC he wasn't sure which was worse: the idea that President Donald Trump is actively in league with Russia, or simply too stupid to know he and his inner circle are being manipulated by the Kremlin.
"Rewinding a couple of years ago when I first started on this, I always used the useful idiot scenario," Watts said. "They just weren't really aware of what was going on around them. It wasn't until he fired Comey that I became concerned there was something to hide. Why lie about these things?"
"The real issue here is which is worse," Watts continued. "That he's working in concert with Russia, or that he is unaware that Russia did this, and they were trying to influence the campaign?"
"In many ways it's equally scary that the president and his inner circle can be so quickly and so easily penetrated and compromised," Watts went on. "If we look at it from this perspective, just talking about Trump Tower Moscow, Russia knew about this the entire time during the campaign. They had the ability to leak this, or to use it, or hang it over their head."
"That sort of leverage is exactly how Russia designed this campaign from the beginning," he added. "It is to put their tentacles into every person in the campaign, it's to throw information from afar, it's to push narratives, it's when he says 'Russia if you have the e-mails, launch cyber attacks right after that targeting the United States.' That's really the serious issue that this is all predicated on in the beginning."
"So what are we going to about that?" Watts said, unable to answer his own question.
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