Former intelligence officers alarmed by Trump's briefing readout 'That's just awful,' says former CIA Director Michael Hayden.

Donald Trump’s decision to offer up a politicized readout of his confidential national security briefings has set off alarm bells in the intelligence community, with some high-profile former officials warning the Republican nominee crossed a “red line.”

During the NBC’s Commander-in-Chief forum on Wednesday night, Trump said “there was one thing that shocked me” from the briefings he received, going on to say that he could tell that government officials were unhappy with President Barack Obama for not following expert advice.


“I was pretty good with the body language,” Trump said.

But former officials with decades of experience in the intelligence community say Trump is bluffing — that trained government officers wouldn’t have betrayed such opinions.

And while experts said Trump didn’t risk national security with his comments, they characterized his move to politicize the briefings as reckless.

“I’ve never seen anything like that,” said former CIA Director Michael Hayden, who has over four decades in the intelligence business and led the agency under George W. Bush, adding, "That's just awful."

“I mean a candidate used the intelligence professionals who were briefing him in an absolutely nonpolitical setting, he imputed to them views that were politically useful to him in the moment," he said.

Hayden, who is not endorsing either candidate but has previously warned that Trump could create a “crisis” in the military, said telegraphing such dissatisfaction “just would not have happened.” He added that the briefing would have been conducted by “very senior folks, very sober.”

Former acting CIA Director Michael Morell, a Hillary Clinton supporter, also forcefully hit back at the notion that intelligence officials would have suggested any displeasure with White House decisions on national security matters.

“Intelligence officers provide objective views of what’s going on in a situation and how that situation might change given the policy options on the table,” said Morell, who will attend a bipartisan meeting of former national security officials that Clinton will convene on Friday.

Recommending policies, added Morell, “are not their job, and anyone running for president should know that.”

But Trump did have a staunch defender in retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who has joined Trump during intelligence briefings.

Flynn, who has often appeared on television as a Trump surrogate and was a contender to be his running mate, told NBC’s "Today" show on Thursday that he agreed with the GOP candidate’s suggestion that the intelligence community is unhappy with Obama.

“The intelligence we’ve received in the last two briefings were in stark contrast to the policy decisions being made,” Flynn said.

“They would say the intelligence professionals, as they should, they would say those are policy decisions,” Flynn continued. "So Donald Trump, in a very, very sophisticated way, was asking tough questions, and they would back off and say, ‘That is not our job, those are policy decisions at the—in this case the White House is making.’ And we would sit there and go, OK, we understand."

Flynn, however, caught some controversy himself when NBC News reported on Thursday that Flynn was unruly in one of the briefings. The report stated that Trump’s transition chief, Chris Christie, had to calm Flynn down after he repeatedly interrupted intelligence officers with pointed questions.

In a telephone interview, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani also came to Trump's defense, saying the nominee was just expressing an opinion of what the intelligence officers were trying to communicate.

“An observation of somebody’s body language is somebody’s opinion,” said Giuliani, a key Trump supporter.

Pressed on whether it was appropriate for Trump to publicly characterize the body language of anonymous officials who cannot publicly speak up about their own views, Giuliani said, “It’s an expression of an opinion, which I always thought we were entitled to do in America. Not every opinion we express can be verified or corroborated. I mean, Hillary Clinton is perfectly capable of saying his opinion is self-serving. She can defend herself against that if she wants.”

Giuliani added that Clinton was in no position to criticize Trump for talking about a secret meeting.

“At least he didn’t expose any classified any information,” Giuliani said, noting that Clinton’s private email server potentially exposed confidential communiqués to foreign hacking. (FBI Director James Comey said it was possible such an infiltration occurred, but there’s no direct evidence that it did.)

With Trump under fire for his readout of the briefing, Clinton piled on, calling his remarks “totally inappropriate and undisciplined” when asked about them during a press conference at the Westchester airport in White Plains, New York.

Morell added in an interview, “It’s the first time a candidate for president has ever, ever given any sort of readout from a national intelligence briefing. And the first time a presidential candidate has ever politicized a national intelligence briefing. Both of those things are highly inappropriate. Both of those things cross a long-standing red line respected by Democrats and Republicans.”

While intelligence officials are agog at Trump’s comments, they’re not confident there will be any concrete repercussions.

Hayden predicted that National Intelligence Director James Clapper will be inclined to “let this pass.”

(A spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which has conducted the briefings for both candidates, declined to comment.)

But Hayden said that if he were still in government, he’d probably approach Christie, “and simply say, ‘Look governor, we’re going to brief the candidate … but can I have your commitment that nothing that transpires in those meetings will be made public again?’”

He added, “And that would not be an unreasonable request.”

Asked if Trump’s comments could hurt morale within the intelligence community, Hayden noted that Trump recently declared that he doesn’t trust intelligence “from the people that have been doing it from our country.”

“They’re not blind,” Hayden said. “They know what he said before he went in. Then they know how their presence was used to further a nakedly political objective.”

Brianna Ehley contributed to this report.