Ex-CIA chief on Trump's distrust in intel: 'I've never seen anything like this'

Leon Panetta, the former CIA director, aired concerns with Donald Trump’s public resistance to the intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia sought to disrupt the election through cyberattacks, calling it “unheard of and unprecedented.”

“I've never seen anything like this in my lifetime,” Panetta told NBC’s Matt Lauer in an interview taped Thursday and aired Friday on the "Today" show. “The fact that the president-elect is tweeting on this issue and taking it to the public, and in many ways undermining the credibility of the very intelligence agencies that have to provide information to him in order for him to be president of the United States, this is just unheard of and unprecedented, and I think we all have to be concerned about this.”


“This is not the kind of bickering that ought to be going on in public,” he concluded.

Panetta, a Democrat who led the CIA and later the Defense Department during the Obama administration, was blunt in his interview with Lauer. He sounded dismayed that Trump has taken to Twitter to question intelligence officials’ conclusion from October that Russia was behind cyberattacks on top Democratic Party officials during the presidential campaign.

The hacks of private emails from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, were published on the website WikiLeaks, embarrassing the Clinton campaign. Trump has repeatedly declined to accept the intelligence that the Russians hacked the emails, despite offering no alternative evidence, and claimed that it is an attempt to delegitimize his victory.

“Very frankly, if a president is going to be successful, this is no way to start,” Panetta said, when asked about Trump’s tweets sowing doubt on the intelligence community’s conclusion. “The president has to work with the intelligence community. ... I'm concerned that it really is damaging the credibility of our intelligence agencies and the morale of those men and women who serve in our intelligence agencies.”

Trump is scheduled to be briefed on the intelligence community’s most recent report on the hacking on Friday afternoon. Officials testified on the report before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday.

Panetta told Lauer that he thinks Trump is “going to realize that this is a very important issue that must be dealt with seriously” when he receives the briefing.

“He’s going to find that it’s easy to tweet about reactions to all kinds of issues, but to seriously deal with our national security and deal with the threats to our country is a business that ought to be done in the confines of the Oval Office,” Panetta said.