Schiff: Trump’s ‘Putting Vladimir Putin’ and His Own ‘Narrow Personal Self-Interest Before the Country’

EXCERPT:

SCHIFF: "He’s saying basically, 'The intelligence agencies are just political agencies. And I couldn’t believe them because those career professionals like Clapper and Brennan who served the country for 30 or 50 years respectively, well, you just can’t trust them because they’re part of a political establishment. But now I’ve got my own political establishment and I'm doing my own politicization of intelligence communities, so now I can rely on them.' That’s a horrible message that nobody within the I.C. believes or accepts. But it denigrates the agencies nonetheless. This is just how he operates. There’s this constant motif, 'Everything that came before me was awful and bad and wrong and we were dupes. And now everything is great.' But he goes overseas, he doesn’t put the country first, as John McCain said and I made the same observation immediately when I learned of the President's comments. He’s putting Putin and he's putting his own, Donald Trump’s own narrow personal self-interest before the country. And that is a terrible quality to have in the president of the United States."