Trump Pentagon official says reports that Biden shared intelligence on Russian aggression in Ukraine with China reflect a ‘colossal failure of leadership’
- Former Pentagon Chief of Staff Kash Patel demanded an investigation into President Joe Biden over reports they shared Russia intel with Beijing
- Senior Biden officials reportedly did so in a bid to persuade China to help de-escalate Vladimir Putin’s aggressive military buildup at Ukraine’s borders
- The Russian autocrat gave his forces the order to attack late last week
- China reportedly shared the intelligence they got from US with Russia
Former Pentagon official Kash Patel took aim at the Biden administration on Sunday over recent reports that the White House shared intelligence about Russia’s troop movements near Ukraine with China.
President Joe Biden’s senior officials held six meetings across three months with counterparts in Beijing as Russian President Vladimir Putin aggressively amassed troops at Ukraine’s borders, the New York Times reported on Friday.
The US was reportedly hoping Chinese President Xi Jinping would dissuade Putin from attacking its neighbor. The Western pleas for help were dismissed each time, with China claiming an invasion wasn’t likely.
Meanwhile Beijing was sharing the sensitive information with Moscow.
China’s message to the Kremlin along with the US’s intelligence reports was that Americans were only looking to sow discord and signaled China would not stand in the way of whatever Russia’s plans are, officials told the Times.
‘It’s a colossal failure of leadership, and it shows another distinction yet between the Biden administration and the Trump administration,’ Patel told Fox’s Sunday Morning Futures.
Ukrainian Territorial Defence fighters test the automatic grenade launcher taken from a destroyed Russian infantry mobility vehicle GAZ Tigr after the fight in Kharkiv on February 27
An Ukrainian Territorial Defense fighter examines a destroyed Russian infantry mobility vehicle in Kharkiv. Ukrainian forces have been mounting an historic resistance effort to Moscow’s invasion
Putin personally ordered a ‘military operation’ on Ukraine in the early hours of Thursday morning last week. Within minutes explosions rocked the areas surrounding the nation’s cities. Since then Kyiv’s military has been staving off an unprovoked attack from Moscow that’s included offensives by air, land and sea.
Biden gave a press conference on the crisis last week where he was asked whether he’d call on China to ‘help isolate Russia.
The president said he was ‘not prepared to comment on that at the moment.’
‘The fact that the commander-in-chief wouldn’t answer that question that no one is covering, leads me to believe that he took classified intelligence — and the reporting is accurate now from multiple sources — and handed it over to our world’s biggest enemy, US’s biggest enemy, his biggest enemy, China,’ Patel said on Sunday.
Patel was the chief of staff to Acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller, after having served on Trump’s National Security Council. He was also among the first members of Trump’s orbit to be subpoenaed by the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack.
On Sunday he said Biden should have foreseen that China and Russia would likely share information given by the US between each other.
Patel, who briefly served as Pentagon chief of staff under the Trump administration, demanded an investigation into Biden over reports his officials shared intelligence reports on Russian troop movements with Beijing
‘Of course, China was going to turn around and give it to Russia because Xi Jinping and Putin have paired up and teamed up against the United States of America,’ Patel said.
‘The fact that this commander in chief did not know that was going to happen is outrageous.’
He took his accusations a step further, venturing to claim that giving the intelligence reports to China actively harmed Ukraine and Europe’s effort to stave off the first shooting war seen on the continent in the 21st century.
‘But what is tantamount, and disrupts American national security, is that we’re actually doing that. We, as the United States, are actually sharing classified information that jeopardizes Ukrainian national security interests, European national security interests and American lives,’ Patel claimed, despite no US troops being sent to directly confront Russia in Ukraine.
‘It’s being shared with our enemy who is sharing it with the next biggest enemy of America. It is just something that never happened under Trump, and the fact that it’s happening under Biden needs to be fully investigated.’
Shortly before Trump’s first impeachment — which centered on a phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky during which the US president leveraged security assistance in return for an investigation into Joe Biden and his son Hunter — Patel was accused of communicating with Trump about Kyiv matters via an improper backchannel.
Fiona Hill, a top Trump adviser on Russia at the time, told House impeachment investigators that Trump believed Patel was his Ukraine director and they communicated matters about the Eastern European nation outside of normal National Security Adviser channels.
It alarmed national security and foreign policy officials at the time who worried US relations with Kyiv was be influenced by Trump loyalists.
Patel denied the accusations in a statement to Axios.
‘Any reporting to the contrary, and any testimony provided to Congress, is simply false, and any current or former staff who suggest I have raised or discussed Ukraine matters with President Trump, are similarly misinformed or spreading outright falsehoods,’ he said at the time.
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