Former CIA official Philip Mudd said he has doubts about CNN’s report on the U.S. withdrawing a high-level covert source close to the Kremlin from Russia in 2017.
Mudd, who is now a CNN counterterrorism analyst, took issue with the report’s assertion President Trump’s handling of classified information led to the decision to conduct the extraction.
“I question whether this angle of the story about whether the president’s engagement with intelligence was actually a spur in the extraction of the informant,” Mudd said Monday on The Lead with Jake Tapper.
“I suspect there were other issues here,” he added.
The report stressed the exfiltration of this unnamed informant took place after Trump met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in the Oval Office in May 2017 and disclosed some classified information about an anti-ISIS operation in Syria that had been provided by Israel.
Sources who spoke to CNN’s chief national security correspondent Jim Sciutto stressed Trump’s actions prompted U.S. intelligence officials to revisit prior conversations about the risk this individual could be exposed. Concerns about the informant dated as far back as the end of the Obama administration.
Although he had doubts about the “political angle” of the report, Mudd said the loss of this informant is “devastating” because of the U.S. losing insight into Russian President Vladimir Putin’s thinking.
Mudd is a former deputy director of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center and the FBI’s National Security Branch. Asked about what people in the intelligence community are saying about Trump, he acknowledged that there is suspicion “generally” about how the president looks at intelligence.
