National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster belittled President Donald Trump at a private dinner, according to a Monday report from BuzzFeed.
McMaster reportedly made the comments during a July dinner with Oracle CEO Safra Catz. The BuzzFeed report cited four sources who heard about the exchange from Catz. These sources told BuzzFeed that McMaster called his boss an “idiot,” a “dope” and said Trump had the intelligence of a “kindergartner.”
National Security Council spokesman Michael Anton and a top Oracle executive both denied that McMaster made these disparaging comments.
“Actual participants in the dinner deny that General McMaster made any of the comments attributed to him by anonymous sources. Those false comments represent the diametric opposite of General McMaster’s actual views,” Anton told BuzzFeed.
The BuzzFeed report also said that McMaster spoke ill of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser. “Of [Kushner], one source told BuzzFeed News, McMaster said he had no business being in the White House and should not be involved in national security issues.”
Longtime Trump ally Roger Stone was the first to mention the alleged comments from McMaster.
The political operative told conspiracy theorist Alex Jones that McMaster was drunk during his dinner with Catz and told her: “The president is a dope, he is incapable of understanding anything beyond 140 characters – the idea of this guy having the nuclear football is scary – I see my mission as preventing him from blowing up the globe.”
McMaster would not be the first senior administration official to have been reported disparaging the president in private. It was reported in October that Tillerson called Trump a “moron” during a meeting, something the secretary of state later refused to deny ever saying.
