National security expert Malcolm Nance said on Monday that President Donald Trump’s tweets, actions and response to ongoing investigation surrounding him and his 2016 presidential campaign are leading many to question whether he is a traitor.
“Rhetorically, the president of the United States cannot go around tweeting about people who are investigating his activities as being treasonous because we may have that as a fact at the end of this,” Nance, who formerly served as U.S. Navy senior chief petty officer, said on MSNBC. “The president of the United States may have committed treason.”
Earlier in the interview, Nance criticized Trump for attacking his own intelligence and law enforcement officials.
“These phrases, ‘taking down an elected president’, ‘a bureaucratic coup’ — this is Donald Trump’s characterization of what the patriots at the FBI and the Department of justice,who were defending the Constitution of the United States, using their sworn positions to identify a threat to the United States and who were confronted by the fact that we had a candidate for president of the United States, now president of the United States, who may, in fact, have been an asset or an agent of a foreign power,” the national security expert said.
Retweeting a clip of his appearance later, Nance wrote the caption : “The words Treason and Traitor are now being mainstreamed. It took almost 3 years but we are not even halfway through the looking glass.”
Nance’s comments came in the wake of an explosive interview by CBS News 60 Minutes with former FBI Acting Director Andrew McCabe, who was pushed out by Trump in January 2018. McCabe explained that following Trump’s decision to fire his boss James Comey, he ordered an investigation into whether the president had obstructed justice. He also claimed that Trump clearly stated that he trusted Russian President Vladimir Putin’s assessment of North Korean capabilities over that of his own intelligence agencies.
“I was very concerned that I was able to put the Russia case on absolutely solid ground, in an indelible fashion,” McCabe said during the interview. “That were I removed quickly, or reassigned or fired, that the case could not be closed or vanish in the night without a trace.”
