On Monday (September 5), MSNBC’s Joy Reid wondered aloud if the classified documents seized during the FBI’s raid of former President Donald Trump’s home could have a link to a spate of U.S. spy deaths in 2021.
The comments came during the panel’s discussion on Monday’s episode of “The Reid Out” about the decision by a federal judge to grant Trump’s request that a special master is appointed to review the documents retrieved by the FBI.
The panel expressed their disdain for the judge making Trump “untouchable” before Reid speculated the documents could have some connection to CIA assets being killed.
“While all of this is happening, we know that in 2021 that there was a rash of deaths of American spies,” Reid introduced her argument, adding, “They were being caught. They were being killed. This is a very real and exigent circumstance. The CIA has admitted to that.”
“Now, we are not saying that we know there is some connection between the purloined documents and those events. But they did happen at a time when Trump did have custody of some really sensitive information that he should not have had,” Reid concluded her remarks.
Reports about CIA agents allegedly being murdered first emerged in 2021, after the New York Times received a memo revealing that the CIA warned stations that “troubling numbers of informants” were being killed or captured.
The memo detailed reasons for the worrying figures, including “poor tradecraft, being too trusting of sources, underestimating foreign intelligence agencies,” and “moving too quickly to recruit informants while not paying enough attention to potential counterintelligence risks.”
Reid also suggested the seizure of Russian oligarch Victor Vekselberg’s yacht in April may also be linked to the raid, considering the billionaire businessman’s prior meetings with Trump’s team.
“When you think about Victor Vekselberg, who is being investigated for something else for fraud, but he’s a Russian oligarch in Trump crony world. His house recently got raided. His yacht got seized. You think investigators were looking for something different?”
Reid, speaking primarily from speculation, added, “Trump knows the kind of people who one might want to investigate, who might want to do bad things to the United States and might not be on our side. And I wonder how frustrated do you think law enforcement must be knowing that they can’t look at any of that.”
