Former CIA officer Marc Polymeropoulos said Wednesday he remains baffled by President Donald Trump’s attempt to explain the secret plane switch in Turkey, labeling the president’s remarks the usual “verbal word salad” that collapses under scrutiny.
Polymeropoulos, a 26-year intelligence veteran, appeared on MS NOW and zeroed in on Trump’s rambling answers from Tuesday’s press conference. The White House is still battling criticism that the president left others exposed to a possible foreign attack when he slipped away via catering truck to a different aircraft. Polymeropoulos argued Trump is only making the situation harder for anyone trying to defend him.
The government had a “duty to warn” those placed at risk, he said, calling the episode “pretty dramatic.”“In this case, you really look, it looks like that Air Force One, the original Air Force One, was at some risk and the secretary of state assumingly knew this, but the press corps and other members of the staff did not,” he explained.
“And so I think the American people deserve to know how this decision-making process evolved,” he suggested. “And first of all — or just to kind of bookend President Trump’s remarks there about the alternate aircraft being at greater risk — I have no idea what he’s talking about.”
Polymeropoulos did not soften the assessment. “That actually flies in the face of all of this,” he pointed out. “But I think that’s just kind of the usual verbal kind of word salad we hear that makes no sense whatsoever,” he added.
The comments leave Trump’s defenders with a clear problem: an experienced intelligence official is saying the president’s own account of the security decision contradicts the facts on the ground and offers no coherent explanation for putting staff and the press on a plane that was apparently considered a target.
Watch the segment in the link below:
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