Maddow offers a terrifying theory that explains Trump's Pentagon moves

The host of "The Rachel Maddow Show" on Friday offered her audience a theory that may explain some of President Donald Trump's actions concerning the Pentagon in his final months in office.

Maddow built her case off of a new Washington Post story titled, "Pentagon blocks visits to military spy agencies by Biden transition team."

"The Trump administration has refused to allow members of President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team to meet with officials at U.S. intelligence agencies that are controlled by the Pentagon, undermining prospects for a smooth transfer of power," the newspaper reported, citing "current and former U.S. officials."

"The officials said the Biden team has not been able to engage with leaders at the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and other military-run spy services with classified budgets and global espionage platforms," the newspaper reported. "Current and former officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter, said the delays have impaired the Biden team’s ability to get up to speed on espionage operations against Russia, China, Iran and other U.S. adversaries."

Maddow offered her analysis of the report.

"So here we go, right? I mean, we have been wondering and we have been covering on this show in recent days, the question of what Trump has been aiming at with what he's been doing at the Pentagon. With all the -- forgive me -- random, junior-level screwballs he has been shoving into high-level positions at the Pentagon since he lost the election. We have been wondering what that was all for. Now it seems like this breaking news tonight at The Washington Post might be part of what this was all about," Maddow reported.

Maddow explained the type of people Trump brought into the Pentagon.

"They brought in, like, the G-team, not only not the A-team, but like really the -- like the people who flunked out of intern-level stuff," she said.

"Why are they bothering? Why are they expending this energy? Why are they doing this stuff?" she wondered. "What is worth all this time and energy to get into all the top jobs in the Pentagon, every lunatic junior varsity, Qanon, Alex Jones, My Pillow guy, who thinks aliens speak to him through his fillings, so he needs to wrap his head in tin foil before he crawls under his mattress to sleep? Why bother? Why are they doing this? What are those guys supposed to do there in these last few weeks in the Pentagon before Biden takes over?"

"Well, maybe at least in part they're there so that the Biden transition has nobody sane at the Pentagon who will talk to them about what's going on right now in some of the most sensitive and important national security stuff that is potentially exploitable by foreign adversaries during presidential transitions, right? I mean, Biden's transition team is not getting briefed, we now know, on the spy-versus-spy stuff that happens between us and Russia and us and China and Iran and all the rest of it," she explained.

Maddow warned there could be devastating consequences.

"The United States military is the largest and most capable military on the planet," she noted. "But it turns out that if you have terrible people running those entities and running them poorly, it doesn't really matter how big and powerful you are on paper or how big and powerful you might have been in the past. You can be rendered completely helpless and impotent by just having in the right place the wrong people who are terrible at what they do."

"That is -- I mean a lot of what we'll remember about the Trump era is the outrage, but what we will be living with from the Trump era is the failure, the deliberate, rank failure," Maddow concluded.

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