Foreign policy expert explains how Russia is attacking US democracy — with the help of Trump's White House

During his frequent appearances on MSNBC, former U.S. Navy intelligence officer and foreign policy expert Malcolm Nance has been as critical of Donald Trump’s presidency as he has been supportive of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. Nance has made it clear that he takes Russian government interference in the 2016 presidential election quite seriously, and during an appearance on Washington Post Live on Wednesday, the Philadelphia native declared that “it’s time for a second Cold War.”

Nance (author of the 2018 book "The Plot to Destroy Democracy: How Putin and His Spies Are Undermining America and Dismantling the West") explained why he believes that democracy in the U.S. “must be defended right now” against the Russian government. “We have been under attack,” Nance stressed, “and now, we have that attack occurring within our own institutions—coming from, I’m sorry to say it, our own White House.”

The Trump Administration, Nance continued, is “now attacking the 243-year tradition” of U.S. democracy and has been “attacking everything that has been built since the end of World War II—the entire Atlantic alliance.”

Obviously referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin, Nance said that the Trump White House is acting “at the behest of a dictator who is an ex-KGB colonel.” Putin, Nance added, “understands the power of harnessing information and turning that into a weapons system. Everything we’re seeing, even though it comes from the Russian Federation, is really a product of the Soviet-era KGB.”

Nance went on to say that in the Trump era, the U.S. is “literally putting down our sword” where the Russian Federation is concerned and that 2020’s Democratic presidential nominees “are going to have to enunciate their position on the defense of the Constitution.”

Nance emphasized that future Russian interference in U.S. elections cannot be tolerated, asserting, “People say, ‘Oh, you want to have a nuclear war.’ No, I want a war where…. what happened in the 2016 election is punished and shown that the United States and its allies will never allow this to happen again.”