Hillary Clinton’s former campaign chairman said in a new interview that President Trump is “unfit for office” and that his actions are “absolutely crazy.”
“He’s impetuous, he’s impulsive, he fires things off and if anything, [his advisers] enable him rather than trying to contain what are moves that in any other context would seem, you know, absolutely crazy,” John Podesta said in an interview with Politico.
“If they’re going to try to right this place and be able to be effective, I think they need a much stronger team who can resist his impulses and tell him that he’s wrong,” he said.
Podesta was at the center of controversy last year after 60,000 of his emails were hacked and published. Those emails are part of the FBI’s investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election.
Trump decided to fire former FBI Director James Comey earlier this month, and initially attributed the decision to a recommendation from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein that said Comey botched the FBI probe into Clinton’s email use, and gave unorthodox press conferences about that investigation.
But in an interview with NBC News, Trump later said he fired Comey because “this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story.”
Podesta called the president’s firing of Comey “laughable.”
“It’s laughable, really laughable that Donald Trump would fire Jim Comey because of his interference which damaged Hillary Clinton,” he said. “I mean it was laughable from the very beginning. Just a complete misreading of reality.”
The New York Times reported Friday that Trump told the Russia foreign minister in an Oval Office meeting Comey was a “nut job.”
That revelation, as well as others involving Trump and the investigation, bring the president “close to an obstruction case, either in the political context of impeachment, or in the context of a criminal grand jury investigation to indict somebody for obstruction.”
Podesta took shots not only at Trump, but also at Republican congressional leaders for “empowering” the president and have decided to “Velcro their own political fate” to Trump’s.
