Another Trump Team Bombshell
A top Trump transition official who would go on to become the Deputy National Security Advisor reporting to Mike Flynn admitted in December she believed the Russians had just thrown the election to Trump. K.T. McFarland, a former Fox News analyst who is now President Trump’s nominee to become ambassador to Singapore (after being forced from her national security role by Trump chief of staff John Kelly) made the statement in an email, part of a series of emails obtained or viewed by The New York Times.
“While Mr. Trump has disparaged as a Democratic ‘hoax’ any claims that he or his aides had unusual interactions with Russian officials, the records suggest that the Trump transition team was intensely focused on improving relations with Moscow and was willing to intervene to pursue that goal despite a request from the Obama administration that it not sow confusion about official American policy before Mr. Trump took office,” the Times reports.
“On Dec. 29, a transition adviser to Mr. Trump, K. T. McFarland, wrote in an email to a colleague that sanctions announced hours before by the Obama administration in retaliation for Russian election meddling were aimed at discrediting Mr. Trump’s victory,” a preposterous and paranoid claim.
Here’s the critical quote:
“The sanctions could also make it much harder for Mr. Trump to ease tensions with Russia, ‘which has just thrown the U.S.A. election to him,’ she wrote in the emails obtained by The Times.”
“It is not clear whether Ms. McFarland was saying she believed that the election had in fact been thrown,” the Times cautiously adds.
But here’s what former independent presidential candidate Evan McMullin, a Republican and former CIA official who ran against Trump, has to say about this new development:
Tom Bossert, now Trump’s Homeland Security adviser, “forwarded Ms. McFarland’s Dec. 29 email exchange about the sanctions to six other Trump advisers, including Mr. Flynn; Reince Priebus, who had been named as chief of staff; Stephen K. Bannon, the senior strategist; and Sean Spicer, who would become the press secretary.”
If any of them believed McFarland was way out of line, as senior officials on the Trump transition team, wouldn’t they have strongly corrected her, scolded or criticized her framing? Wouldn’t at least one of them have said, “K.T., that’s ridiculous, you should never again say something like that.”Â
The Times does not even suggest there was any pushback to McFarland’s emailed assertion that Russia thrown the U.S.A. election to Trump.
The Times adds that “it is evident from the emails — which were obtained from someone who had access to transition team communications — that after learning that President Barack Obama would expel 35 Russian diplomats, the Trump team quickly strategized about how to reassure Russia. The Trump advisers feared that a cycle of retaliation between the United States and Russia would keep the spotlight on Moscow’s election meddling, tarnishing Mr. Trump’s victory and potentially hobbling his presidency from the start.”
MSNBC intelligence analyst Malcolm Nance weighs in:
McFarland “also wrote that the sanctions over Russian election meddling were intended to ‘lure Trump in trap of saying something’ in defense of Russia, and were aimed at ‘discrediting Trump’s victory by saying it was due to Russian interference,'” which of course is nonsense.
The Atlantic’s senior editor Adam Serwer says the McFarland emails “suggest Trump officials wanted to ease sanctions on Russia *explicitly because* of their help winning the election”:
McFarland was also named by some news networks on Friday as one of the senior administration officials who instructed Flynn to contact Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak about Russian sanctions.
And here’s McFarland when she was still a Fox News analyst:
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