Former CIA Director Michael Hayden said Saturday that he gained "a sense of disappointment" from reading the intelligence report on Russian hacking because it lacked true specifics detailing Moscow's interference in the November election.
"Welcome to my old world, in which an awful lot of things we know can't be shared because we need to keep going back to this well in the future to learn things to keep America safe," Hayden, who also directed the National Security Agency, told Michael Smerconish on CNN.
Because the report lacked such detail, Hayden said that he agreed with the CNN host's assessment that the findings were "a brick short of a load."
The report said that Russian President Vladimir Putin and his government "aspired to help President-elect Trump's election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him.
"All three agencies agree with this judgment," the document said. "CIA and FBI have a high confidence in this judgment; NSA has moderate confidence."
Trump, who was briefed on the report Friday before it was declassified, slammed it as a "political witch hunt" and later called for stronger cybersecurity efforts.
He also called for a congressional inquiry into the leak of the report to NBC News on Thursday before his briefing.
Hayden said that when the intelligence community uses the term "high confidence," it means "multiple sources, consistent with other information and good sources.
"When you've got the community coming together and getting high confidence judgments to these things, I certainly have confidence that a true story was put out there, even though I haven't been able to see the fine print."
Regarding Trump's response to the findings, Hayden noted that neither the president-elect nor the transition team have "complained about the facts of the case, even though they've said some other things that want to seem to push the conclusions a bit off to the side."
However, Trump's response focusing on tougher cyber security doesn't address a far more serious problem, Hayden said.
"We've got a Russia problem," he told Smerconish. "The Trump transition team tried to get off the 'X' from that question by simply pushing it over here and saying we've got to do better cybersecurity.
"They're walking away from the core issue, which is the behavior of the Russian Federation."
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