UPDATE: This piece has been updated to reflect a statement from former President Trump’s spokesperson Liz Harrington.
MSNBC host Joe Scarborough said Tuesday that the arrest of a former FBI agent on charges of aiding a sanctioned Russian oligarch disproved claims that the investigation into allegations of collusion with Russia was not a hoax.
Charles McGonigal, formerly a high-ranking counter-intelligence official in the FBI, was arrested Saturday over his ties to Oleg Deripaska, a supporter of Russian president Vladimir Putin. McGonigal allegedly aided Deripaska in evading sanctions imposed by the Trump administration in 2018, according to a release by the Justice Department.
“One of my pet peeves is when I read columns by opinion writers who recklessly throw out the term that conspiracy theorists throw out, ‘Russian hoax,’” Scarborough said. “We know that when Marco Rubio was running the Senate Intel Committee, that they actually said Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and its contacts with Russia caused a direct threat to the United States of America. We know now that there was Russian influence that infiltrated the upper reaches of the FBI in the New York office.” (RELATED: Crossfire Hurricane Team Didn’t Know About Steele’s Work For A Russian Oligarch, DOJ Report Says)
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“You get a guy bought off by the Russians, working on a Russia investigation, that ends up deciding Trump doesn’t have contact with Russia, how stupid do these people think we are?” Scarborough said. “He’s on the take from the Russians, from a Russian oligarch, and he gives Trump the ‘good housekeeping’ seal of approval that the FBI does.”
“If anything, it undermines the FBI’s conclusion that Donald Trump has a clean bill of health there, when, again, even the Republican Senate Intel Committee said that wasn’t the case,” Scarborough added.
Deripaska also had ties with Christopher Steele, the author of a now-discredited dossier that claimed Trump’s 2016 campaign colluded with Russia.
“This is delusional. This validates, once again, President Trump wasn’t colluding with Russia, but Hillary Clinton and the FBI were,” Trump spokesperson Liz Harrington told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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