Former CIA Director Michael Hayden said Tuesday that Donald Trump Jr. saying he would "love" negative Russia information about Hillary Clinton "especially later in the summer" pointed to "soft collusion" with Moscow.
"Look, I'm not a lawyer, and I'm a foreign intel guy, not the domestic law-enforcement guy," Hayden, who also served as NSA director, told Erin Burnett on CNN. "But there was one line in the email that struck me.
"The kind of soft collusion that we might see as this story rolls forward," he continued.
"The kind of soft collusion I'm referring to here was the line in the email that simply suggested 'if you got bad stuff, August or September, late summer is the time we'll really need it.'
"That's a member of the campaign – perhaps unwittingly, informally, carelessly – at least suggesting when this kind of information would be most useful," Hayden said.
In the emails Trump Jr. released Tuesday after a report by The New York Times, he told a Moscow operative of the alleged Clinton data: "If it's what you say I love it especially later in the summer."
Hayden told Burnett "the plain-English meaning of the emails was that senior members of the Trump campaign were willing to cooperate to receive information from what they thought would be a Russian government agent to help defeat Hillary Clinton.
"That's a fairly momentous thing," he added. "I don't think it's treasonous."
Hayden added Trump Jr.'s emails feel like "part of that extended synchronized massive Russian covert influence effort to affect the American electoral process."
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