Russian president Vladimir Putin has baffled the Obama Administration and his most recent maneuvers have caught the White House "with their pants down" Andrea Mitchell said Monday afternoon.
"This is blunt, this is angry, and they say the president is not going to be shy at this hour. What he is going to say to him, ‘Look what you've done in Ukraine. Look what you've supported in Syria,’" Mitchell said. "But frankly, the Putin maneuvers, going on 60 Minutes reaching a large audience, announcing new initiatives, has really caught the White House with their pants down."
At the very same time President Obama and Putin began a meeting to discuss important geopolitical issues such as Russia’s annexation of Crimea and military involvement in Syria, Mitchell and Chuck Todd trashed Obama’s response handling of the Middle East.
"I want to run through President Obama's scenarios and frankly they probably look more like errors than anything else when it comes to Syria," Todd said.
Todd slammed Obama’s inability to act after drawing a red line, allowing Putin to interfere with whatever plans the president had set. He also mocked the Pentagon’s efforts to train moderate Syrian rebels to fight the Assad regime.
"That report was unbelievable, the amount of people that we've been able to train," Todd said. "Not 400 or 500, which would have been a pitiful, four or five."
Mitchell cited a bipartisan report by Congress that will be released tomorrow as more bad news.
"They (ISIS) have recruited more fighters than we have killed," Mitchell said. "So our air war is not succeeding and more Americans are being brought in, 250. They've more than doubled the number of American jihadists."
Promising blunt talk and a confrontational tone, the Obama Administration seeks to put an end to Russia’s antagonizing actions. The president has not ruled out working with Russia and Iran to solve the crisis in Syria.