Security Officials Question Russia's Intention On Election Hack
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Washington finds itself in the middle of an astonishing spectacle. Just weeks before taking office, the U.S. president-elect is publicly shaming the nation's intelligence agencies and delegating others to receive his security briefings. It's Donald Trump's response to the CIA's conclusion that Russian government hackers worked to swing the presidential election in his favor. Yesterday, Trump spokesman Jason Miller said all this talk of Russia's role in the election is just politics.
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JASON MILLER: What this is is an attempt to try to de-legitimize President-elect Trump's win. That really seems to be the - what's going on here.
MARTIN: But some Republican leaders in Congress see it differently and are planning investigations into Russia's activities during the campaign. Retired Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden is with us in the studio this morning to talk about this. He served as CIA director and before that director of the National Security Agency under President George W. Bush. We should also point out Gen. Hayden was one of 50 former national security officials from past Republican administrations who went on the record during the campaign saying Donald Trump is not qualified to be president. Gen. Hayden, thanks so much for coming in this morning.
MICHAEL HAYDEN: Thank you, Rachel.
MARTIN: The CIA has not been without its critics over the years. This is different, this is the president-elect doling out the criticism publicly. What are the stakes here?
HAYDEN: Well, number one, to have that done publicly and done by the president-elect is just uncharted territory. We've never seen that before. Now look, a president-elect, a president has a right to challenge the CIA. I have experienced that in my time in government. Game on, that's fair. You have to be able to stand your ground. But the challenge is based on your analysis. The challenge is based on your appreciation of the facts. The challenge is based on, I have an alternative reason for this. This is just a dismissal of what the agency has said without an investigation of its data or of its analysis. That's scary that the fact-based guys get shoved out of the room before there is any argument frankly, Rachel, it appears because what they're concluding seems unpleasant.
MARTIN: I want to ask you about possible influencing factors here. The New York Times has a piece this morning about Donald Trump's pick for national security adviser, retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn. The piece says Flynn is known to be outwardly contemptuous of the country's civilian intelligence agencies and that he appears to have brought Trump over to his way of thinking. What are the implications of that moving into the Trump administration?
HAYDEN: Well, number one, I don't know that Mike did that. I don't know that Mike had influence on this. You saw the president-elect have this attitude continuously toward the story that the Russians had conducted a covert influence campaign. By the way, he's the only prominent American I know of who continues to refuse to accept the reality I just described. Now, Mike did have his issues within the intelligence community, but, you know, that's not unusual. I mean, this sometimes gets very contentious, where people look at the same data and come up with different conclusions. So I'm not prepared to say that Mike poisoned the well here. I think this is a dynamic that we have a president-elect who had great confidence in his a priori assumptions, his a priori beliefs. And it appears that at least in this case he's not willing to hear contrary arguments.
MARTIN: One of Trump and Flynn's criticism of the CIA is one that's been around a long time, that it sometimes tailors its intelligence findings to support White House policy. Trump points to the CIA's conclusion about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. How do you counter that?
HAYDEN: Well, number one, the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was our mistake, not the administration's. I was in the room when we voted on it. I'm the one who said, yes, I think that's true. By the way, a lot of other intelligence agencies around the world thought it was true also. But in this particular case, Rachel, let's kind of parse out that accusation. John Brennan loves the Central Intelligence Agency. John has spent his life...
MARTIN: The current director.
HAYDEN: Right. I find it very hard to believe that John would push his agency out into the center of traffic - which is what this assessment has done - if he didn't in good conscience believe the facts lead him to this conclusion. There is no upside for the CIA to go out and say this unless they're compelled to do so by their understanding of truth.
MARTIN: I want to get back to this allegation that Russia attempted to influence the campaign in Trump's favor. How do you see the Russian play here? What do they get from the Trump administration?
HAYDEN: So first of all to kind of deconstruct that, I'm convinced the Russians did it. That's really unarguable. That's not in contention within the United States government, despite some claims over the weekend that that was still disputed fact. I was always of the belief the Russians were doing it to mess with our heads. The Russians were doing this simply to sow confusion here. By the way, if that was their purpose it has succeeded beyond all expectations. I had always been reluctant to conclude that they were doing it to pick a winner. Frankly, I thought that was just too hard, you know, how that information would play in our American political process.
MARTIN: Do you still feel that way?
HAYDEN: Well, yeah, I do personally, but I'm willing to listen to the arguments as to why some in the CIA now appear to believe they have enough evidence to conclude - and this is a judgment I think, this is what we call an assessment rather than this absolutely provable fact - an assessment that the Russians did this to favor one candidate or another. But, Rachel, the first case is bad enough. The first case is incredibly troubling and we need to investigate that and to divorce that completely from challenging the legitimacy of the president-elect. That should not be on the table.
MARTIN: A few days before the election you wrote - well, it was a pretty damning piece in The Washington Post - about Donald Trump. You called him Moscow's useful fool. You went on to say he was, quote, "some knife manipulated by Moscow, secretly held in contempt but whose blind support is happily accepted and exploited." You seem to be suggesting that a Trump administration would be in and of itself a security risk. Do you still think at?
HAYDEN: You know, what I was trying to say there, I was trying to connect the dots. I had data and the most prominent piece of data I had was the absolute refusal of the candidate then to accept this high-competence judgment from the intelligence community. The face of overwhelming evidence that the Russians had actually did this, he refused to agree to that point and in fact, bent himself into some pretzel-like shapes during the debates in order to avoid criticizing Vladimir Putin. I didn't understand that. And so I offered what I thought was the least damning explanation of that behavior. And the least damning explanation was he really didn't understand what it was he was doing.
MARTIN: The Senate has announced a bipartisan plan to investigate the CIA findings. What do you think they should be looking at specifically?
HAYDEN: They should be looking at the facts. They should be gathering as much information as possible. And, Rachel, I think this is really important, too. And I'm an intel guy, I like protecting sources and methods. But this is an instance when the American public's right to know may push very hard against my old community's need to protect how it gathers some information. This may be a case where you lean very far forward so that the American people can begin to make their own judgments as to what happened here.
MARTIN: May I ask you about Donald Trump's decision to not take the daily presidential security briefing? This is something that historically presidents get it every single day, a briefer comes in person for the last more than a dozen years.
HAYDEN: Right.
MARTIN: He says he doesn't need it every day. What's your take on that?
HAYDEN: So the president gets to choose how he gets his intelligence. Now, for the last 16 years, it's been more or less daily. Prior to that, some presidents didn't. President Carter got it filtered through his national security adviser. But my view, in today's world more is better than less. Personal is better than impersonal. And dialogue is better than just tossing it through the transom.
MARTIN: Is it redundant sometimes?
HAYDEN: You know, I - that - was stunned by that accusation. That thing changes fairly routinely. You can't cover the whole world in a morning's briefing. Different topics get emphasized at different points. Yeah, there may be some continuity there. But then again, a president might actually appreciate being told that that situation over there hasn't changed very much, but this one over here, Mr. President, we see some new developments. This is an incredibly dynamic situation globally. And, Rachel, this isn't just the intel guys transmitting to the president. This is the president dialoguing with them so they understand his interests, his priorities, his level of knowledge. Word is he wants them to go. And frankly, I think Mr. Trump is not serving himself well by denying himself that opportunity.
MARTIN: He's not even in office yet, yet there is a major trust gap I think we could say between the intelligence agencies and the new administration. How do they move forward? How do they bridge that?
HAYDEN: So we've always accepted the responsibility that it's our job to get into the president's head. All right, it's nice when the president makes it easier, but it's our responsibility to the American people to get our version of reality in front of the new president. And so my old community's going to have to work very hard to find a way to create that reality. Otherwise it's not CIA that suffers, it's the republic.
MARTIN: Retired Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden. He was the director of the CIA from 2006 to 2009. Thank you so much, sir, for coming in.
HAYDEN: Thank you.
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