Retired U.S. Army general Barry McCaffrey says he can’t remain quiet any longer.

Late Friday, the respected four-star general sounded an alarm about uncomfortably close relations between Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, warning in a tweet that the U.S. president appears to be “for some unknown reason under the sway of Mr. Putin.”

Reluctantly I have concluded that President Trump is a serious threat to US national security. He is refusing to protect vital US interests from active Russian attacks. It is apparent that he is for some unknown reason under the sway of Mr Putin. — Barry R McCaffrey (@mccaffreyr3) March 16, 2018

News broke in The New York Times this week of Russian attacks on America’s power grid, following months of revelations about Moscow’s efforts to wreak havoc in U.S. elections. Russia earlier this month was also implicated in the near-lethal nerve attack on Russians living in Salisbury, England.


Through it all, however, the Trump administration has remained inexplicably quiet, failing to launch a serious challenge to Moscow’s aggression.

McCaffrey, a respected and highly decorated military man who served with distinction in Vietnam, said on MSNBC’s The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell program late Friday that there was not one reason for sending his urgent tweet — there are a multitude of them. He cited in particular last week’s nerve gas attack on former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia. The pair, still hospitalized, are fighting for their lives.

“I’ve been fairly critical of the president for a variety of reasons,” McCaffrey told MSNBC, “but it was his not wanting to stand with the British over intelligence about those murders (sic) carried out by the Russians,” he said about the attack on the Skripals.

McCaffrey is a retired four-star General, not one to say such things lightly: https://t.co/8bX9XG832F — Laurence Tribe (@tribelaw) March 17, 2018

The outspoken criticism of Trump — extremely rare by former high-ranking military officers when referring to a U.S. president was echoed by renowned legal scholar Laurence Tribe, who noted that McCaffrey is “not one to say such things lightly.”