McMaster, Mostly Silent Until Now, Says Trump Is ‘Aiding and Abetting Putin’s Efforts’
“This sustained campaign of disruption, disinformation, and denial, is aided by any leader who doesn’t acknowledge it,” President Trump’s former national security adviser said.
The retired Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster became the latest of President Trump’s former aides on Thursday to declare that the president was aiding Russia’s disinformation campaign by failing to acknowledge how President Vladimir V. Putin was trying to manipulate American voters.
“He is aiding and abetting Putin’s efforts by not being direct about this,” Mr. McMaster, a former national security adviser who is now a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, said in an interview on MSNBC. “This sustained campaign of disruption, disinformation and denial is aided by any leader who doesn’t acknowledge it.”
Compared with some other former national security aides, Mr. McMaster has been mostly reluctant to criticize the president, with whom he split in early 2018 after a year in the post. He has declined to sign letters written by other Republicans and former military officers rebuking Mr. Trump, and his new book, “Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World,” is about his vision of American strategy — avoiding the kind of tell-all that his successor, John R. Bolton, published this summer.
In previous interviews to promote his book, Mr. McMaster has avoided direct censure of Mr. Trump, steering the conversation to what he terms the struggle the United States faces with two “revisionist” powers, Russia and China. The opening of his book acknowledges that an insider account “might be lucrative” but would not be “useful or satisfactory for most readers.”
But in speaking with Hallie Jackson of MSNBC on Thursday, he went further than he has at any point in the past in criticizing Mr. Trump for failing to call out Russian action — even as his administration has indicted intelligence officers involved in the 2016 breach of the Democratic National Committee, and imposed sanctions on Russian hackers.
Mr. Trump has often undercut those efforts by calling into question whether Russia was involved in the 2016 hacking, and by criticizing his own appointees, most recently Christopher A. Wray, the director of the F.B.I., for focusing on Russia rather than China and Iran.“Russia is the primary problem in this area,” Mr. McMaster said flatly.
He continued, “This is why I think the president has to be much stronger in condemning this effort to really reduce our confidence in who we are as Americans.”
