Pence chief of staff: ‘There’s not intelligence’ saying Russia wants Trump reelected

Marc Short, chief of staff to Vice President Pence, sparred with Fox News’s Chris Wallace on Sunday after denying that U.S. intelligence shows that Russia intends to interfere in the 2020 election to aid President Trump.

“I think there’s not intelligence that said the Russians are trying to help Donald Trump win [the] election,”  Short said on “Fox News Sunday.” “We know that foreign governments have been trying to interfere in elections to sow chaos.”

“When this administration has sanctioned Russia more than any administration since Ronald Reagan and it seems that the Democrats are going to nominate someone in [Sen.] Bernie Sanders [I-Vt.] who honeymooned in the Soviet Union and still seems to prefer Marxism over capitalism, it’s hard to see why they’d be choosing Donald Trump over Bernie Sanders,” he added. 

Wallace countered by citing reports that former Director of National Intelligence Robert Maguire was fired because his election security czar, Shelby Pierson, told the House Intelligence Committee that Russia preferred Trump in the 2020 election.

“The president’s reaction was to call in her boss … to fire him and replace him with [Ambassador to Germany] Richard Grenell, a Trump partisan who has almost no intelligence experience. You say none of this happened?” Wallace asked.

Short countered by accusing the committee’s Democratic leadership of leaking details of the classified briefing while denying that intelligence indicates Moscow prefers the president.

“It’s not firing. [Maguire’s] position is supposed to be completed by March 12. The administration’s been looking for someone consistently,” Short said, echoing comments from national security adviser Robert O’Brien on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

“The president, of course, was saying, ‘Why did the House get a briefing before I did?’” Short added, claiming that the reported Russian preference for Trump “is false information as far as the briefing that we’ve received.”