On Friday’s “PBS NewsHour,” New York Times columnist David Brooks stated that while “the case is still out” on whether there are ties between Russia and the Trump campaign, the Trump administration does have “high levels of incompetence.”
He stated, “We have a tendency to get a little overhyped to some of the Trump scandals. We go to outrage level 11 at every moment. And I think the Russia — the case is still out how serious it is, whether there’s actual ties between Russia and the Trump campaign, which I think is the core of it, where Paul Manafort came from, whether there was any money laundering, and things like that. There’s a lot we don’t know. And I’m trying to not prejudge it.”
Brooks continued, “What we do know is, there’s high levels of incompetence. And we have a president who tweeted this wiretapping tweet, which was completely wrong. That’s incompetence. We have this young man in the National Security Agency who the — who his boss tried to get rid of, but was preserved by Steve Bannon, who was involved in giving information to Nunes — Chairman [Devin] Nunes (R-CA). We have Nunes himself, who is behaving incompetently. Forget he’s too close to the Trump campaign. There’s a way to conduct an investigation. And it’s not to cancel hearings willy-nilly. It’s not to go brief the guy you’re supposed to be investigating. It’s not to create a civil war within your own committee. And so, we have just levels and levels and levels of just incompetence, of people who just do not know how to play this game. And when that happens, you never know what’s going to happen next. And so I don’t know if it’s a scandal in the class of the Watergate scandal, but it’s not inspiring to see what we’ve been seeing.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.