I'm not a detective, but I've watched enough crime procedurals to recognize the signs of a really stupid criminal trying in vain to cover his tracks. And in this episode of "Law & Order: SVUSA" it's none other than Donald Trump, desperately trying to change the conversation of his collusion and dependence on Russia...by using classic KGB tactics of "deny, deflect and blame others."
Nah, that's not suspicious at all, Comrade Trump.
AM Joy guest host Jonathan Capehart hosted a national security panel with former intelligence agents, Naveed Jamali and Malcolm Nance, former State Department spokesperson Nayyera Haq, Chief Washington reporter for Mother Jones David Corn, and Tara Maller, Sr. Policy Adviser for New America, none of whom could quite believe how bumbling and blatant Trump's machinations have been.
Nayyera Haq said it best: "But what we’re seeing right now is a White House and a president that are furiously spinning to try to put some substance on a meeting that was truly a failure for national security. To spend two and a half hours with the head of your adversary, the lead adversary himself, Putin, and to walk out thinking that they didn’t really do anything wrong, there’s no other person in the United States or any US citizen that would get that kind of treatment from the President of the United States. Right? There’s nobody right now that President Trump would probably say, “Oh, you’re accused of a crime. You said you didn’t do it, I believe you.” So the idea that he would do that with an adversary shows two things: that he truly doesn’t understand what it means to keep America safe and national security and the second part, that he actually can’t handle one-to-one confrontations and conversations. That a lot of his psychology of bullying and the bluster, he folds when it comes to actually being one-on-one with someone at a meeting and what ends up happening is afterwards he has a furious tweet storm to try to cover it up."
Nailed it. It's Trump's tell. We don't need some top profiler or detective to spell it out for us. It's right there on his Twitter stream.
And those tactics aren't unfamiliar to Nance and Jamali, who point out that Trump's tactics of "deny, deflect and make counter-accusations" is a common spy technique of the KGB. Nance cites a mug he saw at the International Spy Museum in Washington DC, but I think this magnet is more apropos to Trump:
