Pentagon advisor calls Trump ‘sociopathic narcissist’ on hidden camera

A security consultant has admitted he joined the government to “catch spies” responsible for Hillary Clinton’s election loss

Controversial US reporter James O’Keefe released a hidden-camera video on Wednesday showing a consultant for the Pentagon seemingly expressing deeply rooted animosity towards President-elect Donald Trump and his incoming administration.

O’Keefe’s approach is to send reporters on dates with their targets, to record candid conversations. He identified the subject of the latest report as Jamie Mannina, a security and artificial intelligence expert working as a private contractor for the US government.

Publicly available information about Mannina, including his LinkedIn profile, describes him as an employee of a firm called Booz Allen Hamilton, who previously worked for the FBI, the office of the Director of National Intelligence, the US Department of State, and for Senator Hillary Clinton, including on her 2016 presidential campaign.

In the video, Mannina says Clinton’s loss to Trump drove him to join the US intelligence community.

”I wanted to catch Russian spies, Chinese spies. They had really affected the outcome, I felt, in 2016. So I became a spy hunter,” he said.

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Mannina described Trump as a “sociopathic narcissist” who is “habitually addicted to lying about himself to advance his personal interests.” He also claimed to be talking with multiple retired generals and admirals, including his “former boss”, to “try to explore what we can do” about Trump’s upcoming second term in office.

The contractor’s critique extended to Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee for secretary of defence. Mannina claimed that the former Army National Guard officer turned political commentator was a womanizer and an “alcoholic”.

Following the release of the video, O’Keefe posted a purported comment by the Joint Staff press service. The statement clarified that Mannina “was a Booz Allen Hamilton contracted employee with Joint Staff J6” C4 & Cyber division, but denied claims that he was an adviser to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Charles Brown.

Mannina’s comments “do not reflect the position” of the top US military official, who is looking forward to “working as President-elect Donald J. Trump’s principal military advisor in the next administration,” the message emphasised.

Billionaire Elon Musk, a Trump confidante, reacted to the video with the acronym WTF, which stands for “What the F**k?”

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Critics have long accused O’Keefe’s of using unethical methods and selective editing of his content to further conservative causes. In 2023, he parted ways with his former publisher, Project Veritas, amid allegations of financial impropriety, to launch a new media organization, OMG.