Malcolm Nance, a former naval intelligence officer and an MSNBC contributor, has become one of the most recognizable voices on Trump-related scandals. According to Brian Williams, MSNBC’s chief anchor, Nance is “a cross between Batman and ‘Fight Club.’ ” The weekend-morning host Joy Reid called Nance “very rational, even though the things that he’s telling you will completely freak you out. He’s super knowledgeable, but he’s also that calming friend.” Nance, however, has been frequently criticized by both the left and the right for promoting false or unproven claims, often having to do with Russia. In March, Nance tweeted that he was convinced that Carter Page was an F.B.I. double agent; he has written, of Trump, “little comes from his mouth that was not put there by shaping actions and experiences with Russians, and was carefully planned to benefit the Russian Republic.” This month, on “Morning Joe,” he claimed that the Russian government had been looking for ways to exploit Trump since the mid-eighties. “Donald Trump sees the world only through Moscow’s point of view,” he stated.

In 2016, Nance wrote the best-selling book “The Plot to Hack America: How Putin’s Cyberspies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election,” which he followed up with another best-seller, “The Plot to Destroy Democracy: How Putin and His Spies Are Undermining America and Dismantling the West.” He has written what could be considered the third part of a trilogy: “The Plot to Betray America: How Team Trump Embraced Our Enemies, Compromised Our Security, and How We Can Fix It.” I recently spoke by phone with Nance, whose intelligence work included stints in the Middle East and North Africa. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed his fears about the Trump Presidency, whether he believes Trump and members of his circle are foreign agents, and the danger of a public square full of conspiracy theories.

Amid all the lies we hear from the White House, how important is it for journalists and commentators to pursue the truth and speak truthfully?

It’s critically important, and that’s one of the reasons why I’ve got three books now on the Trump Administration and their activities. One of the things that I try to make very clear is that I have to deeply, deeply source the information that I’m using. I think that the lowest amount I had was four hundred references, and in this one there are over seven hundred references.

You have written and spoken a lot about Russian disinformation campaigns. How important is it to the Russian government to disseminate untruths and make sure the public square is full of speculation and misinformation?

What the American public has seen play out since 2016 is critical to their strategy, and it really started far, far before that, in a large way, in 2014. You are watching a strategic plan that’s being executed by Russia. None of this is piecemeal; none of this is small-time—it is a long ball game. And they need to use disinformation because, you have to realize, their leader is an ex-K.G.B. officer who used extensive amounts of disinformation that was developed by the K.G.B. And then, when he trained to be the head of Russian Intelligence, he realized all of those old K.G.B. tactics and strategies and techniques were applicable in the real world. But now technology had caught up to where they could be effective, whereas they were never effective in the past. So a person with a laptop can be just as powerful as the New York Times, but with the old disinformation strategies and tactics, which would attack the fault lines of the American experiment. And so it’s very critical to the Russians. One third of the American public refuses to believe the U.S. news media, but we’ll believe propaganda generated by the Russian Federation intelligence agencies.

“They put a set of rose-colored glasses on his face,” you recently stated about the Russian government. “Donald Trump sees the world only through Moscow’s point of view.” What did this mean?

Perception management is a technique in which you frame the information sphere around your opponent, whether it’s an individual or a nation, with so much information that is relatively credible to where your opponent adopts the framework that you are giving him, so that it’s sort of like a pair of rose-colored glasses, right? Only, instead of you needing them, they are created for you and customized around your personality, around how you see the world. And then that disinformation and propaganda—truths, half-truths, and lies—it’s been fitted around you slowly, like boiling the frog, to where you adopt a framework, which only benefits Russia.

Donald Trump got his glasses fitted, so to speak, at that secret meeting at the Nobu restaurant with the twelve richest oligarchs in Russia, including a representative from Putin. [In 2013, Trump met with Russian businessmen at Nobu restaurant in Moscow.] No one knows what was said in it, but we can tell the parameters of it because of how he behaves. And, from that point on, there was nothing negative he could ever say about Russia or Vladimir Putin. So now the reason his perspective constantly complements Russia is because his own education on Russia, Ukraine, and that world has been crafted by Moscow. So he sees it from their world view.

What about the idea, though, that he sees the world through the prism of his own self-interest, combined with a general preference for strongmen and autocracy, as we see when he talks about North Korea or Turkey?

This year, I went to Putin’s office when he [worked] in Dresden, and I learned quite a bit from the experts out there in Germany about how he behaved.

This was the office from when he was a K.G.B. guy in East Germany?

In Dresden, right. Putin learned his ground-game human-intelligence activities very well. It gave him a very, very unique perspective on East versus West and how money motivated virtually every person. We have this acronym, MICE, which you use to recruit spies. “M” is money, “I” is ideology, “C” is coercion or compromise, “E” is ego or excitement. And that’s how you get a person to betray their nation. Putin would have seen when “The Apprentice” came to Russia as a TV show—he would have called back and said to his intelligence staff, ‘Someone go get me the dossier on Donald Trump.’ And then they would have realized that they had been surveilling Donald Trump since 1977. He had an extensive K.G.B. folder. [No evidence has been found to substantiate this claim. According to the Guardian, the Czechoslovakian intelligence agency became interested in Trump as early as 1977. The article also notes that “it’s unclear to what degree the KGB and StB shared or coordinated Trump material.”]

You’re saying that because he married a woman from Czechoslovakia, which was behind the Iron Curtain?

Of course. Every intelligence agency does this when you have people who are noteworthy. However, back in the Communist days and the Cold War, every Westerner who went to the East was evaluated for an intelligence recruitment.