Former CIA Director John Brennan has, over the past two years, been a regular fixture on cable news criticizing and lambasting President Donald Trump. But Trump’s decision to stop strikes on Iran was met with rare praise by Brennan.

Trump said after being told 150 people would die, he deemed strikes “not proportionate to shooting down an unmanned drone.”

MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell asked Brennan, regarding the president’s tweets on his decision-making, “Isn’t he communicating valuable intelligence to the Iranians and the rest of the world?”

Brennan said Trump probably assumed the decision would have leaked, so he felt an obligation to explain why:

“I’ve been a very tough critic of the Trump administration’s policy towards Iran in terms of pulling out of the Iranian nuclear agreement as well as this policy of economic strangulation… But I do applaud Trump’s decision not to carry out what would have been a disproportionate strike that would have led to 150 or so fatalities. And that could have had a very dangerous escalatory spiral following it that could have brought that region to greater military conflict. So I do think that Trump recognized that he needed to explain to his critics exactly why he pulled back. And again, I give him credit, and I rarely do that, but I give him credit for being almost the adult in the room because of the war hawk like John Bolton and Mike Pompeo who are pushing towards this confrontation that is not in anyone’s interest, especially the United States.”

Mitchell asked again whether there’s a concern of Trump “telling too much about our intelligence capabilities.”

“No, I don’t think so,” Brennan said.

At one point, he even went so far as to say, “Donald Trump finally, I think, made a decision that was in our best interests.”

You can watch above, via MSNBC.

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