Rep. Seth Moulton doubled down Friday on recent remarks he made claiming a potential nuclear war with Russia was a possibility.
“That’s right,” the congressman told CNN’s Poppy Harlow on “New Day” when asked to clarify the comment he made at the South by Southwest festival Tuesday.
“(R)ussia now says … they will ‘escalate to de-escalate,'” continued the Massachusetts Democrat. “They are willing to use nuclear weapons to de-escalate a conventional attack, and I think that the problem here is that we don’t have a plan to deal with that.”
At the festival in Austin, Texas, the former Marine Corps officer and member of the House Armed Services Committee first warned of potential nuclear conflict.
“We could literally have a nuclear war with Vladimir Putin,” Moulton said, speaking on the podcast “Pod Save America.”
Later in the “New Day” interview, Moulton went on to assail the Trump administration’s relationship with Russia, suggesting members of President Donald Trump’s team are on the dole of Vladmir Putin’s regime.
“Donald Trump’s minions are paid by the Russian regime,” he said.
Moulton did not provide any evidence for his claim, and CNN has reached out to the White House for comment on his accusation.
On Thursday, CNN reported that a top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee has learned that Flynn was paid more than $33,750 by Russia’s state-run broadcaster RT TV-Russia for a speech in Moscow in December 2015.
“(T)he bottom line is this — everybody should be paying more attention to the threat from Russia,” Moulton told Harlow. “It’s serious and significant and Democrats and Republicans need to come together to fight back. This is about our national security and fundamental tenets of our democracy.”