Former acting CIA Director John McLaughlin on Friday accused President Trump Donald John TrumpBiden on Trump's refusal to commit to peaceful transfer of power: 'What country are we in?' Romney: 'Unthinkable and unacceptable' to not commit to peaceful transition of power Two Louisville police officers shot amid Breonna Taylor grand jury protests MORE of siding “with the enemy” during his press conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier this week.

“The United States was attacked and the president sided with the enemy in his Helsinki remarks,” McLaughlin said of the president’s controversial performance at the summit Monday, during which he backed Putin's denial of Moscow's interference in the 2016 election. Trump later said on Tuesday that he misspoke, though his corrections have done little to quell the uproar after the president appeared to dismiss the conclusions of his own intelligence agencies.

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When asked during an interview with MSNBC’s Brian Williams about what his reaction was when a reporter was the one who broke the news to Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats that the White House has invited Putin to Washington, D.C., for a second meeting this fall, McLaughlin said the government “is not functioning normally.”





“I’ve served seven presidents. That would not happen in any other administration and it shows that the president was not prepared for the Helsinki summit and is now improvising again,” McLaughlin said. “Normally the way this works in a normal government that is in gear is that, as you know, there will be deputy’s meetings and principal’s meetings to prepare for these things. The pros and cons would be discussed in detail, people would put their cards on the table, we’d go ahead, but with full knowledge of what we wanted out of it and unintended consequences spelled out. Clearly that did not happen. It seemed to go from Trump’s head to his thumb to out to the world.”

He later added that there seems to be a "shifting of the tide" in the past few weeks.

"At what point will there be critical mass of objection to some of the lunacy that’s going on here under this president?" McLaughlin asked.