Joe Biden comes right out and says that he thinks Donald Trump is being controlled by Vladimir Putin.

(The pertinent portions starts at the 5:25 mark.)

Courtesy of Addicting Info: 

As everyone else avoids directly addressing what is going on with Donald Trump and Russia, former Vice President Joe Biden just doesn’t seem to feel the need to mince words. 

MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell asked Biden on Thursday why Trump was “so reluctant to take on Vladimir Putin” — and she got an answer she probably was not expecting. 

“Look, you know, I want to give every American, including the president, the benefit of the doubt, but I can’t fathom any reason other than he is concerned of what Putin might say or do, or what information he may or may not have,” Biden said, adding that the Trump administration was not making a sufficient effort to prevent Russia from again interfering in our elections. 

“But look, unrelated to the whole issue of whether or not there’s collusion, separate and apart from all that, it’s necessary for us to stem this problem,” he told Mitchell. “It’s necessary for us to corral the Russians.”

Leave it to Joe "This is a big fucking deal" Biden to come right out and say what so many of us know to be true.

Yes, Donald Trump is an asset for the Kremlin.

And EVERY American, without regard to party affiliation or ideology, should be demanding that he be removed from office.

I would also add that any American NOT calling for that is essentially a traitor to their country, and that includes every Republican in Washington working to undermine the FBI or to obstruct the Mueller investigation. 

Newsweek reports that veteran intelligence experts believe that Trump is indeed a Kremlin asset.

Courtesy of Newsweek: 

In a December 18 interview on CNN, retired Air Force Lieutenant General James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, virtually called Trump a Putin puppet. The Russian president, Clapper noted, is a former KGB “case officer,” or spy recruiter, who “knows how to handle an asset, and that's what he's doing with the president. That’s the appearance to me.” (Pressed to clarify his “asset” comment, Clapper said, “I’m saying this figuratively.”)

“Wow,” tweeted former CIA Russian hand John Sipher. “The rest of us try to find other clever ways to say the same thing. Good on him for having the courage to call out Putin’s behavior. Our president shouldn’t have fallen for it.”

Wow. The rest of us try to find other clever ways to say the same thing. Good on him for having the courage to call out Putin's behavior. Our President shouldn't have fallen for it. https://t.co/J6YdGCxCi4

— John Sipher (@john_sipher) December 18, 2017

Veteran spy handlers have judged Trump an easy mark for Putin, who spent years in the KGB sizing up and exploiting a target’s vulnerabilities. They note how easily he falls for praise, as when Putin thanked him and the CIA for helping him thwart a bomb attack plot in St. Petersburg. “POTUS is a [spy] handlers’ dream,” Asha Rangappa, a former special agent in the FBI’s counterintelligence division, said. “He responds, without fail, to praise and flattery and telegraphs his day-to-day thoughts on Twitter. Likewise, said Harry “Skip” Brandon, a former FBI deputy assistant director of national security and counterterrorism. “He often very publicly states he goes by his instincts. If that is accurate, he may be the ultimate unwitting asset of Russia.”

And so on. The steady drip of revelations emerging from multiple Trump investigations—his business deals with Russian investors, his associates’ many undeclared meetings with Kremlin agents, his resistance to accepting evidence of Russian meddling in the 2016 election and his indiscretion with Israeli intelligence—draws a far darker picture.

Some veteran intelligence operators think it’s well past time to shift the narrative on Trump’s disturbing affinity for Putin, which the president insists is innocent and good for world peace. “Everyone continues to dance around a clear assessment of what’s going on,” says Glenn Carle, a former CIA national intelligence officer responsible for evaluating foreign threats. “My assessment,” he tells Newsweek, “is that Trump is actually working directly for the Russians.”

For a while now I have started to think that the investigations are no longer focused on collusion, but instead are fathering information about a conspiracy between Trump and team, and the Russians.

It is not just that the Russians helped the Trump campaign, and the Trump campaign accepted that help.

It is that there was a long term strategy that Putin worked out to insert an actual Russian asset into the White House, and that asset is Donald Trump himself.

And if that is the case than it makes what Sarah Kendzior said the other day, all the more troubling.