Ex-acting CIA director concerned about Russians
BURLINGAME >> Former acting CIA Director John McLaughlin on Tuesday warned of Russian aggression and criticized President Donald Trump for not taking election-related hacking by Russia seriously enough.
“This is a very urgent problem — it’s an assault on the heart of our democracy,” McLaughlin said in an interview with the Mercury News and East Bay Times, before an appearance at the Hilton Bayfront Hotel. “We have elections coming up in less than two years. It will happen again if we don’t prevent it.”
In his 32-year career in the CIA, McLaughlin served as deputy director of central intelligence — the second-highest position in the agency — for four years and acting CIA director for several months in 2004.
Looking from the outside, McLaughlin, 75, said he thought the Trump administration was rudderless in responding to Russian hacking.
“I don’t know what our policy on Russia is right now — do you?” McLaughlin asked. “Frankly, at this point it’s difficult to know what President Trump actually thinks about this. He has not said as forcefully as he needs to that he acknowledges what the Russians have done and wants them to stop.”
The issue of Russian influence has cast a cloud over Trump’s presidency, despite the president’s repeated assertions that he and his advisers have not colluded with Moscow. In tweets, Trump has called the investigations to connections between Russia and his campaign a “witch hunt.”
The issue could come to a climax next month if Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin meet in person at the G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany, as expected.
During that high-stakes meeting, Trump should be unambiguous that future Russia-U.S. relations are based on an understanding that Russian election hacking ends, McLaughlin said.
“It’ll be interesting to see how clearly and forcefully” Trump tells Putin “to knock it off,” he said.
In his speech, sponsored by Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont, McLaughlin discussed how the U.S. can learn from European countries — which he said had more experienced in dealing with Russian antagonism. Sweden, for example, has a program that teaches elementary school students how to detect Russian propaganda.
Overall, McLaughlin said he saw Trump improving over the course of his first five months in office. “He does seem to be gradually coming to grips with the complexities of his job,” McLaughlin said.
But he said the drumbeat of news reports about Trump’s actions on Russia were concerning, from Trump adviser and son-inlaw Jared Kushner’s alleged effort to create a back channel with Russian officials — if it’s true, McLaughlin said, “I can’t believe anyone would be that dumb” — to the report that Trump asked Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers to publicly refute the idea that there was collusion between members of his presidential campaign and Russia.
Nothing like that ever happened during his three decades years at the CIA, McLaughlin said.
More generally, McLaughlin, who’s now a fellow at Johns Hopkins University, said he worried that a cavalcade of news about Russia and Trump was numbing Americans to the danger of foreign attacks on our elections process — as well as what he said was the president’s record of bending the facts.
“It begins to seem normal … that other countries interfere in our elections, and normal that the president engages in so many falsehoods,” McLaughlin said. “That can’t become normal, but it may if it goes on and on.
“It damages his credibility and ours.”