Former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci called on those loyal to President Trump to tell him he was wrong at the Helsinki summit.
“If you’re loyal to the president - loyalty requires you to tell the truth and sit with him,” Mr. Sacaramucci said during an interview on CNN’s “Newsroom.”
“His smartest, most loyal aides and his smartest most trusted advisers that are super loyal to him need to get to him and say this is a grave mistake,” he explained.
The former communications director said that someone needs to explain why the optics, getting along with President Putin, and not defending the intelligence community “are very bad.”
Mr. Saramucci, a longtime defender of the president, justified Mr. Trump’s desire for a good relationship with Mr. Putin as a means to “suppress the anxiety and the antagonism of the last five or six years.”
However, he said choosing that over backing the U.S. intelligence community was wrong.
“I think he’s made a very big mistake here,” he said.
Mr. Saramucci suggested that it would be “very simple” for the president to release a statement to affirm his support for Dan Coats and the intelligence agency. He said Mr. Trump should acknowledge that “men and women have lost their lives to acquiring this information.”
When asked why Mr. Trump never released such a statement, Mr. Saramucci acknowledged that the president was “sore about questions” concerning his election’s legitimacy....
“The president is conflating the two issues,” he said, “he’s tying collusion accusations to the irrefutable evidence that the Russians meddled in the election.”Mr. Saramucci urged the president to reverse course on his Russia rhetoric. Otherwise, the former White House official predicted Mr. Trump will create “unnatural alliances against him” and “eventually lose people who want to support him.”