Rep. Swalwell questions Trump’s loyalty: Is he with Russia or the U.S.?

Relp. Eric Swalwel, D-Calif., delivered a scathing condemnation of President Trump in the aftermath of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s resignation late Monday.

In a conversation with Yahoo News on Tuesday morning, Swalwell, the lead Democrat on the CIA Subcommittee of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said there’s a wealth of evidence leading him to question whether Trump is loyal to the United States or Russia.

“The Republicans may have the majorities in Congress and their candidate may have won the White House, but [the Democrats] are not helpless. We have the American people, and the American people will not be satisfied until they know whether the president is with us or with Russia,” Swalwell said. “What happened with Michael Flynn I think shows clearly that there are a lot more questions that need to be answered.”

Swalwell said the White House knew that Flynn had lied about his conversations with a Russian ambassador but allowed him to maintain his top-secret security clearance and brief the president. He said the administration only dumped Flynn once the press revealed that he had discussed easing sanctions against the Kremlin, potentially violating the law. Flynn also reportedly misled Vice President Mike Pence about the discussion.

“They’re willing to keep people who have improper relationships with Russia until the public finds out and it hurts them in the realm of popular opinion,” Swalwell said. “Getting rid of a rotten plank does not fix a compromised platform.”

The U.S. intelligence community said Russia launched a multifaceted campaign of propaganda and deception intended to sway the presidential election in Trump’s favor. Former President Barack Obama leveled sanctions against the Kremlin in response

According to Swalwell, Trump’s behavior is also disturbing. The California lawmaker cited Trump’s admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin, his statements comparing U.S. government actions to the Kremlin’s “killers,” the White House’s revised sanctions that affect Russia’s Federal Security Service (Russia’s top security agency), his openness to easing other sanctions against Moscow and his skepticism toward the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which Swalwell considers the world’s greatest check on Russia.

“Then if you look at the fact that he won’t release his taxes, which could clear up a lot of questions about his global financial holdings and whether there are deals with Russians,” Swalwell continued, “I think all of those arrows point to a single question: Who are his loyalties with?”

Swalwell said there are many people in the Trump administration, including the president himself, who had personal, political and financial relationships with Russia before the election. Trump has rejected this sort of characterization and recently tweeted, “I don’t know Putin, have no deals in Russia, and the haters are going crazy!”

“The American people are concerned whether Russia is going to be paid back for the work they did to help get Donald Trump elected. I think Flynn should motivate us to want to learn more about those relationships,” he said.

Robert Amsterdam, a lawyer who has represented international oil and gas companies, including Russian oil oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, characterized this questioning of Trump’s loyalty as “very ill-advised commentary.”