Former White House adviser Susan Rice said Friday on MSNBC’s “Deadline” that President Donald Trump’s Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was a “setup.”
Rice said, “Obviously it is a very sad day and an embarrassment for the United States on the world stage. But let’s step back and analyze what’s happened here I think there’s no question that this was a setup. You heard Donald Trump say at the end of that clip you played, this is great television. This was a setup. I mean, excuse me, Vladimir Zelensky was compelled to agree to a horrible deal that would have set Ukraine’s minerals to the United States without any concrete security guarantees. And yet, because he was trying to improve a relationship with Donald Trump, he came to Washington, he came to the Oval Office and sat down for a meeting hat in hand. Soon after he got there the Vice President of the United States lit into him and started a confrontation.”
She continued, “I’ve been in countless Oval Office meetings with heads of state, presidents and vice presidents, as national security adviser, as UN ambassador, and in other roles. I can tell you that the vice president or the secretary of state or anybody else, they don’t jump in, hijack a conversation without the express blessing of the President of the United States. So JD Vance did that deliberately. Donald Trump knew what he was going to do. I think, as he said at the end, because he can’t help himself, this was a setup for the cameras. It was a play to his base, but above all, it was a play to Vladimir Putin to show fealty to Vladimir Putin and to try to humiliate Zelensky.”
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