Susan Rice: Trump picks Putin over troops ‘even when it comes to the blood of American service members’

Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice said Sunday that President Trump picks Russian President Vladimir Putin over U.S. troops “even when it comes to the blood of American service members.”

Rice, who also served as former President Obama’s national security adviser, told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that she believes Trump was briefed on the intelligence that Russia was offering bounties to Taliban-linked militants to kill U.S. and coalition service members in Afghanistan.

“The message to Vladimir Putin is you can kill American servicemen and women with absolute impunity,” she said. “This is an extraordinary revelation. The president of the United States has demonstrated absolutely callous disregard for the safety and security of American forces in a war zone and there’s no explanation for this.”

{mosads}“Now we learn that even when it comes to the blood of American service members, this president picks Putin over our troops,” she added.

The former national security adviser said intelligence is “very, very rarely” proven with “100 percent certainty” after administration officials have claimed the intelligence was contradictory. 

She said if advisers did not inform Trump of the intelligence last year, she thinks it would be “because they’re scared of him.”

Rice, a possible contender for presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s vice presidential pick, also cited that “everything [Trump] has done since” his denial of the intelligence community’s findings of Russian interference in the 2016 election, has benefited Russia. 

She pointed to his “standing up” for Putin at the Helsinki Summit, his invitation to Russia to join the G7 and his removal of a third of U.S. troops from Germany.