President Donald Trump has previously claimed he knew about Osama bin Laden before 9/11. | Jim Lo Scalzo-Pool/Getty Images White House Trump says he was right to criticize hunt for Osama bin Laden

President Donald Trump on Monday dug in on his criticism of the hunt for Osama bin Laden, tweeting that he was right to declare that the Al Qaeda leader should have been caught long before 2011.

"Of course we should have captured Osama Bin Laden long before we did. I pointed him out in my book just BEFORE the attack on the World Trade Center. President Clinton famously missed his shot. We paid Pakistan Billions of Dollars & they never told us he was living there. Fools!.." Trump wrote Monday in the first of a two-part tweet.


He continued: "....We no longer pay Pakistan the $Billions because they would take our money and do nothing for us, Bin Laden being a prime example, Afghanistan being another. They were just one of many countries that take from the United States without giving anything in return. That’s ENDING!"

During an interview with Fox News' Chris Wallace that aired on Sunday night, Trump derided retired Adm. William H. McRaven for being a "Hillary Clinton fan" and for not catching bin Laden more quickly. McRaven oversaw the U.S. military operation in which bin Laden was killed and a treasure-trove of Al Qaeda documents was uncovered.

The operation ended a nearly decadelong manhunt for the Al Qaeda leader responsible for ordering the 9/11 attacks, who hid in a compound in Pakistan and orchestrated byzantine rules to conceal his location. The raid was seen as a major triumph for former President Barack Obama.

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McRaven has been an outspoken critic of Trump and has defended the media against the president's anti-press rhetoric, but did not actively endorse any candidate during the 2016 election.

But the Republican National Committee argued McRaven was a partisan Trump critic who was reportedly on Hillary Clinton's short list for vice president during the 2016 election campaign. Clinton ultimately opted for Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) as her running mate.

"(McRaven)’s been critical of President @realDonaldTrump — even dating back to the 2016 campaign. He’s hardly a non-political figure," the RNC wrote in a tweet Monday.

"Wouldn’t it have been nice if we got Osama bin Laden a lot sooner than that, wouldn’t it have been nice?" Trump also said during his interview with Wallace. "But living in Pakistan right next to the military academy, everybody in Pakistan knew he was there."

CNN's national security analyst Peter Bergen wrote that while researching and interviewing Pakistani officials, he found none of them knew bin Laden was hiding in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where he was eventually found.

Robert J. O'Neill, a former Marine credited with firing the shots that killed bin Laden, rebutted Trump's comments on Monday, tweeting: "The mission to get bin Laden was bipartisan. We all wanted to get him as soon as we could."

O'Neill joined Fox News as a contributor in 2015, and has spoken both in support of Trump's actions, such as defending his then-nominee for the Supreme Court Brett Kavanaugh, as well as condemning some of Trump's more theatrical antics, calling Trump's planned military parade "third world bull----."

Former CIA Director Leon Panetta, who oversaw the operation to locate bin Laden, criticized Trump's remarks during an MSNBC interview on Monday. When asked about the president's remarks on the length of the manhunt for bin Laden, Panetta laughed, later adding the mission was one of the "proudest" moments in U.S. military history.

Panetta suggested Trump's criticisms were misdirected, pointing out the CIA did not notify McRaven about bin Laden's whereabouts until about three months before the operation to kill him.

"This president owes Adm. McRaven and all of the SEALs involved in that operation an apology for what he's saying," Panetta said. "He's undermining his position as commander in chief, not only with those that conducted the operation, but with the entire military."

Trump has previously claimed he knew about bin Laden before 9/11. At a 2015 rally, Trump claimed he warned about bin Laden in his 2000 book "The America We Deserve," CBS News reported at the time. But a CBS fact check points out Trump merely mentioned bin Laden as an example of poor U.S. foreign policy, and did not warn or predict the terrorist attacks.

Bin Laden had also been known to U.S. intelligence long before 9/11. The U.S. determined he was connected with the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, and concluded that he ordered the attack in retaliation for the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia.