Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) said on Sunday that President Trump is acting as if he has been “compromised” by the Russians, floating once again the notion that Moscow could have damaging information on the U.S. leader.
“I certainly think he’s acting like someone who’s compromised, and it may very well be that he is compromised or it may very well be that he believes that he’s compromised, that the Russians have information on him,” Schiff said on ABC’s “This Week.”
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Trump came under intense bipartisan scrutiny last week after a controversial joint news conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki in which the U.S. leader challenged the assessment of his own intelligence community that Moscow meddled in the 2016 election. He later walked back those remarks.
He also appeared to place blame on the U.S. for current tensions with Russia, saying that Washington has been “foolish.”
In an op-ed for The New York Times last week, Rep. Will Hurd (R-Texas), a former CIA agent, warned that the U.S. president appeared to be “manipulated” by Moscow and was “playing into Vladimir Putin’s hands.”
Tom Bossert, Trump’s former homeland security adviser, pushed back on Schiff’s remarks on Sunday, saying on “This Week” that it was a “cheap shot” to suggest that the president had been compromised by Moscow.
“It’s an easy, cheap shot to say the president’s been compromised by the Russians,” Bossert said.
“I think the Russians elected a former KGB agent and he spends all of his time and their resources squandering it on penny-ante spy tactics to try to get into loser kind of lobbyist pockets and so forth,” he added, referencing Putin’s past as an intelligence agent.