Michael J. Morell, former deputy director of the CIA who served under three presidents, penned an op-ed for the New York Times wherein he strongly endorses former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for president.
Morell prefaces the piece by saying he’s voted for both parties in the past, and that he’s always stayed silent on his position regarding a president – until now.
After extolling Hillary Clinton’s depth of qualifications, Morell offered cutting observations of Republican Donald Trump’s dangerous lack of foreign experience and knowledge.
In sharp contrast to Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Trump has no experience on national security. Even more important, the character traits he has exhibited during the primary season suggest he would be a poor, even dangerous, commander in chief.
These traits include his obvious need for self-aggrandizement, his overreaction to perceived slights, his tendency to make decisions based on intuition, his refusal to change his views based on new information, his routine carelessness with the facts, his unwillingness to listen to others and his lack of respect for the rule of law.
The dangers that flow from Mr. Trump’s character are not just risks that would emerge if he became president. It is already damaging our national security.
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was a career intelligence officer, trained to identify vulnerabilities in an individual and to exploit them. That is exactly what he did early in the primaries. Mr. Putin played upon Mr. Trump’s vulnerabilities by complimenting him. He responded just as Mr. Putin had calculated.
[snip]
In the intelligence business, we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.
