MSNBC Guest ‘Carefully’ Compares Donald Trump to Joseph Stalin
A MSNBC guest who once worked for the KGB compared President Donald Trump’s conflicts with the FBI and with other federal agencies to an infamous Soviet dictator’s distrust of his own secret service.
“You know, this is like sort of reminiscent — and I got to be careful here so I don’t get misquoted — but Stalin, in the old days, had a really well-functioning intelligence agency,” said Jack Barsky. “And he didn’t trust them.”
Barsky added, “Now, here’s the point: we are at a point now where, particularly, our president — you know, made statements that he doesn’t trust our intelligence agencies. Then why have them?”
Chris Jansing had brought on the KGB defector and MSNBC contributor Naveed Jamli, who once worked as an FBI double agent, to discuss the ongoing Comey controversy. Moments earlier, Barsky emphasized that “we need to allow our intelligence agencies to do their work. I absolutely, from day one, when this all broke, I didn’t like the fact that, you know, the FBI — in particularly, James Comey — became a target of a political football, so to speak — back and forth; back and forth.”
Barsky later contended that “what I don’t like is that we are trying to play out these issues right now in public — sort of interfering, in some sense, with the FBI doing their work.”
The former KGB spy was born Albert Dittrich in East Germany. According to a February 2017 profile by the BBC, he arrived in New York City in 1978 under an assumed identity, and soon took the Barsky identity, which was the name of a deceased 10-year-old boy who was buried in the Mount Lebanon Cemetery outside of Washington D.C.
Barsky was ultimately exposed as a Soviet spy by Vasili Nikitich Mitrokhin, a KGB archivist who defected to the West in 1992. The FBI monitored him, and finally confronted him. But he cooperated with the federal agents, who helped him to become an American citizen.
The BBC article also noted that Barsky “also found God, completing his journey from a hardline communist and atheist to a churchgoing, all-American patriot.”
[image via screengrab]
