Ex-ARMY officer who worked with McMaster: 'He's not telling the whole truth'

A prominent retired Lieutenant Colonel who has known US National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster for decades, explained to NPR that McMaster isn't being honest with the American people.

Retired Army Lt. Col. John Nagl spoke with NPR's Rachel Martin about how and why McMaster has been "parsing his words" so carefully.

"I think he is not answering the question that he was asked," Nagl suggested. "And I think that he is doing so knowing absolutely in full cognizance of the fact that he is not telling the whole truth, but he's being very careful not to tell lies."

Nagl suggested obfuscation is all McMaster can do given the actions of President Donald Trump.

"I obviously think he's in an absolutely impossible position," Nagl told NPR. "The president expects him to defend the indefensible."

There was much criticism of the precise wording McMaster used at his emergency press conference on the Comey memos.

Greg Miller, who co-wrote the Washington Post bombshell, said “the White House is playing word games” immediately following the press conference.

That's similar to what Nagl told NPR.

Lt. Col. Nagl recounted a story of a class on the West Point Honor Code that both Nagl and McMaster took while attending the service academy in the 1980s.

"One of the scenarios that they discussed was what happens if you've been invited to a dinner and the dinner is horrible, and the hostess asks, how did you enjoy dinner?" Nagl recalled. "And what we're taught to say in that point is I really enjoyed being here in the company I was in."

Nagl claimed that analogy explained the precise wording used by McMaster, in light of a similar "horrible" situation.

"The administration is clearly in freefall mode, in other words a spiral," the retired Lt. Col concluded. "My phrase is the wheels are coming off."

After West Point, John Nagal was chosen as a Rhodes Scholar. He also earned his doctorate from Oxford and has taught at both West Point and Naval Academy. He advises Secretary of Defense James Mattis as a member of the Defense Policy Board.

The White House has been in damage control since their firing of FBI Director James Comey last week. Then there were the revelations about President Trump giving away highly classified secrets during his Oval Office visit with Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak (reported to be the top Kremlin spy-master for America).

Yet all of that pales in comparison to the political storm battering the White House since news broke about the alleged existence of the Comey Memos. If the Comey Memos do substantiate Obstruction of Justice by President Donald Trump, they may be a mortal wound for the embattled administration.

A White House staffer who worked on the Trump 2016 campaign said, “I don’t see how Trump isn’t completely f*cked.”

Listen to the whole interview: