‘Drunk monkey with a machine gun crazy’: MSNBC panelist shocked by latest reports on Trump White House

The "unhinged" White House Dec. 18 meeting that featured three men linked to Russian spies looks even worse from a counterterrorism perspective, an analyst explained on MSNBC on Saturday.

"Four days after the electors met across the country and made Joe Biden the president elect, Donald Trump was still trying to find a way to hang on to the presidency," Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) said in Tuesday's select committee public hearing.

"On Friday, December 18th, his team of outside advisers paid him a surprise visit in the White House that would quickly become the stuff of legend," Raskin continued. "The meeting has been called unhinged, not normal and the craziest meeting of the Trump presidency. The outside lawyers who'd been involved in dozens of failed lawsuits had lots of theories supporting the big lie, but no evidence to support it."

The idea of using the U.S. military to seize voting machines was discussed.

"In the wee hours of December 19th, dissatisfied with his options, Donald Trump decided to call for a large and wild crowd on Wednesday, January 6th, the day when Congress would meet to certify the electoral votes," Raskin explained. "Never before in American history had a president called for a crowd to come contest the counting of electoral votes by Congress or engaged in any effort designed to influence, delay, or obstruct the joint session of Congress in doing its work required by our Constitution and the Electoral Count Act. As we'll see, Donald Trump's 1:42 AM tweet electrified and galvanized his supporters, especially the dangerous extremists in the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys, and other racist and white nationalist groups spoiling for a fight against the government."

For analysis, MSNBC's Katie Phang interviewed Malcolm Nance, the author of the 2018 book, The Plot to Destroy Democracy: How Putin and His Spies Are Undermining America and Dismantling the West and the 2019 book The Plot to Betray America: How Team Trump Embraced Our Enemies, Compromised Our Security, and How We Can Fix It.

"Can I point out," Nance began "this is the Patrick Byrne who had an intimate relationship with a Russian spy, Maria Butina."

"Maria Butina! Phang interjected.

"That Russian spy infiltrated the United States," Nance noted. "He actually tried to fund her election into the Russian parliament. This guy should never have been allowed near the outside gate to the White House, much less into the room with the president of the United States to push a case -- to push a story that North Korea, China, dead Hugo Chavez — who had been dead for 13 years — was doing this attack on the United States."

"This is Tom Clancy stuff that they turned into a reality and actually talk to the man who had control of several thousand atomic bombs who believed the United States was under political attack and that he had to do a coup d'état against American democracy in order to make sure that everything was on the up and up," Nance said. "This is not just crazy, it is dangerous crazy. It is, you know, drunk monkey with a machine gun crazy."

Watch:

Malcolm Nancewww.youtube.com