Video News Clips: In Their Own Words

Corporate Media Dredge Up Deep State Fossils To Moan About How Trump Is Handling Ukraine-Russia Talks

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Corporate media outlets have been bringing on old and disreputable former foreign policy officials to complain about how President Donald Trump has been handling negotiations to end the Russia-Ukraine war.

Trump hosted an Alaska summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday and welcomed a group of European leaders at the White House on Monday to discuss ending the war, including Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. CNN and MSNBC have relied on ex-intel and defense chiefs who pushed debunked narratives on the Hunter Biden laptop and Steele Dossier to criticize Trump’s peace efforts.

Even just hosting the summit in Alaska drew the ire of former national security adviser John Bolton on CNN’s “The Source with Kaitlan Collins” on Aug. 8.

WATCH:

Looks like Putin’s got his old magic back with Trump. His disappointment and outrage with Putin are gone. A Putin-Trump summit in former Russia-America, Alaska, is not quite as bad as Trump inviting the Taliban to Camp David, but certainly reminds one of that. pic.twitter.com/oK81qRcFNG

— John Bolton (@AmbJohnBolton) August 9, 2025

“The only better place for Putin than Alaska would be if the summit were being held in Moscow,” Bolton said. “So, the initial setup, I think, is a great victory for Putin. He’s a rogue leader of a pariah state, and he’s going to be welcomed into the United States.”

Bolton has been an outspoken Trump critic. Trump asserted on Twitter in September 2019 that he had requested Bolton’s resignation because he “disagreed strongly with many of his suggestions, as did others in the Administration.”

Trump told the Daily Caller in June 2020 about a series of conversations he had with Bolton that made him realize he was a “dumb maniac who wants to go to war with any anybody that can breathe.”

In June 2019, Trump reportedly halted a missile strike he had ordered against Iran in response to the downing of a U.S. Navy drone by an Iranian surface-to-air missile. Trump’s decision reportedly went against Bolton’s preference.

CNN also brought on former CIA Director Leon Panetta on “The Arena” Tuesday, who criticized Trump’s strategy for ending the war, including orchestrating meetings and not following through on threats.

WATCH:

“One of my concerns about all of these meetings is just how much preparation is actually going into these meetings in order to try to achieve some conclusion,” Panetta said. “And if all you’re doing is meeting to be meeting, and not really knowing where you’re headed, you know, the chances are Putin’s going to succeed here in just playing for time.”

“I think it’s very important, if you’re going to deal with somebody like Putin, that you have to be credible. And I think the president has hurt himself on his credibility here,” he continued. “He said he wanted a ceasefire. He didn’t get it. He said he was going to implement sanctions. That didn’t happen. He said if he didn’t get what he wanted, there was going to be severe consequences. That has not happened.”

Panetta signed a letter in October 2020 that dismissed the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop as having the “classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” He also doubled down on the letter’s conclusion on “Special Report with Bret Baier” in 2023.

The Daily Caller News Foundation, The New York Times, The Washington Post and other media outlets have all authenticated the contents of the laptop.

Moreover, former CIA Director and MSNBC senior national security and intelligence analyst John Brennan went on MSNBC’s “The Weeknight” Monday and said Trump was damaging his and America’s “credibility” through his handling of the war.

WATCH:

“I think Donald Trump continues to show that he is really a very unserious statesman. The fact that a president of the United States sits in the Oval Office and meets with a foreign leader, President Zelenskyy, and then disparages his own predecessor, Joe Biden, calling him a horrible, corrupt president — he undermines the credibility of the United States,” Brennan said. “Not only his own credibility, but the credibility of the United States itself, because he has demonstrated that he is willing to just change course on a whim.”

Brennan, who also signed the Hunter Biden laptop letter, is currently under fire for his handling of the Russia 2016 election investigation he participated in under former President Barack Obama, based on newly declassified documents.

For instance, he asserted on NBC’s “Meet the Press” in February 2018 that the discredited Steele Dossier “did not play any role whatsoever in the intelligence community assessments that was presented to then President Obama and then President-elect Trump.”

A 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) found that Putin interfered in the 2016 election with “a clear preference” for Trump. The CIA’s June review of the ICA found that Brennan pushed to include the Steele Dossier in the assessment.

Brennan is reportedly under criminal investigation for potential wrongdoing regarding the infamous dossier, according to Fox News Digital. He denied the dossier was “used as a source or taken into account for any of its analysis or conclusions” in a July 30 New York Times opinion piece he co-authored with former Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper.

“At the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s insistence, a short summary of the dossier was added as a separate annex only to the most highly classified version of the document that contained the assessment,” they wrote. “That annex also explained why the dossier was not used in the assessment.”

In Trump’s second term so far, he has helped broker peace deals between India and Pakistan, Thailand and Cambodia, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo and Azerbaijan and Armenia.