Retired Adm. Mike Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, cautioned the White House Thursday about pursuing the intelligence leaks dogging the administration.

"The harder you chase leaks, the more leaks there will be," Mullen, who chaired the Joint Chiefs from 2007 to 2011, said in an interview with "CBS This Morning."

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"If you continue to press hard on the intelligence community, the worry is the intelligence community may pull back on what they share with the president," he added.



Mullen praised Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein's selection of former FBI Director Robert Mueller as special counsel to investigate Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.

"It's hard to know with all of the discussion on both sides of this issue that it will happen, let's say, quickly, but I've got a lot of faith in him and his background that he'll be able to do that," he said.

The former Joint Chiefs chairman said that the White House's crises are "self-generating."