US parties at each other's throats: Ex-CIA agent

The US Democratic Party is attacking President Donald Trump’s cabinet members to undermine his administration and push for more seats in the 2018 congressional elections, former CIA agent Philip Giraldi says. 

The attacks "are ways of weakening the Trump administration and making it more difficult for the Trump administration to do things like rapprochement with Russia,” Giraldi told Press TV on Thursday night.

Democrats have urged Attorney General Jeff Sessions to resign for hiding contacts with Russia after he admitted meeting with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak twice during Trump’s campaign last year.

Giraldi said, “The Democrats are very much into doing whatever they can to make Trump look bad and that’s why we’re seeing the type of press coverage that we’ve had and why we’re seeing these very personalized attacks coming from other politicians.”

House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi has called for the attorney general’s resignation for “lying under oath.”

“In the United States, the parties are right now very much at each other’s throats and it’s a question of they’re trying to gain advantage by anything they can, by anything they’re able to do and they are very much looking for 2018 election,” Giraldi said. 

He further ruled out speculation that former President Barack Obama as a top Democratic politician was conspiring to delegitimize the Trump administration. Nevertheless, "there are certainly people around the former president that are quite capable of engineering a program to delegitimize Trump," Giraldi added.

Some American politicians have accused Russia of cyber-attacks against the Democratic Party’s internet accounts during the 2016 presidential election. US intelligence officials, however, have acknowledged there is no evidence showing hackers had altered the election results.

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Giraldi said, “The Russians certainly had a certain amount of influence in terms of some of the stories that surfaced near the time of the voting ... but whether this was decisive or not no one really knows that."  

Peter Sinnott, an independent scholar from New York, said the main reason the Trump administration is under investigation is really because of what has happened to the Democrats.

The United States is in a situation where “any member of Congress – senator or congressman – that meets with a foreign ambassador can suddenly have this used against them and that’s absurd,” he said. 

Sinnott said the US is getting involved in a “sense of focus on a partisanship” that is higher than what was seen since the Watergate scandal in 1972.

“If we’re going to have him (Sessions) resign, then we’re in a situation where we call it a witch-hunt and trying to undermine this administration,” he added.

Sinnott said American politics has been so damaged by this sense that Russia influenced the US presidential election.  

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