DENVER -- University of Denver professor Dr. Jonathan Adelman says he thinks there is some truth to the stories about Trump administration officials having contact with Russia before the inauguration.
President Donald Trump says those stories are fake, but still called for the resignation of National Security Advisor Michael Flynn for misleading the Vice President about a conversation with the Russian ambassador.
“What shouldn’t have happened is that someone like Flynn should have known better than before he had taken office and gone through the normal procedures to have any kind of relationship with the Russians,” Dr. Adelman told Anne Trujillo on this week’s Politics Unplugged. “The Russians are still classified as an enemy of the United States.”
Adelman has taught at the Russian Foreign Ministry. He says there is a good reason we hear stories about Russians hacking U.S. computer systems.
“They have some extraordinarily intelligent people because unlike in the United States where the vast majority of people in high tech go to Silicon Valley or Denver, Colorado, in Russia they don’t have a Silicon Valley,” Adelman explained. “What that means is that the best and the brightest go to work for the military industrial complex and so when you see them being able to penetrate our capabilities in cyber warfare, it’s not a total accident.”
The professor says Russia isn’t the biggest challenge President Trump faces. He says that may be Iran.
“If you follow what’s going on in Iran, they believe they’re winning,” he said before adding a personal example. “I just did yesterday, an Op-Ed that appeared in Fox News and what it said is that Iran is a lot weaker than anyone thinks. I already got complaints from the Iranian side saying that I am the cowardly person that doesn’t know what the hell he is talking about.”
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Politics Unplugged airs Sundays at 4 p.m. on Denver7.
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