Former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta ripped President Donald Trump on Tuesday for attacking National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster for his Russian comments in Germany over the weekend, saying "that was a cheap shot to have the president do that."
"Gen. McMaster is a [lieutenant] general in the United States Army," Panetta, who served in the Obama White House, told Wolf Blitzer on CNN.
"His responsibility is to deal with the national security of this country, as national security adviser."
At the Munich Security Conference on Saturday, McMaster said that the federal indictments announced Friday against 13 Russians and three companies in the Kremlin proved that "evidence is now really incontrovertible" that Moscow meddled in the 2016 presidential election.
But in his speech minutes earlier, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov dismissed the indictments brought by Moscow special counsel Robert Mueller as "just blabber," according to remarks through an interpreter.
Trump, however, tweeted later Saturday that McMaster "forgot to say" that the election's outcome was not affected by Russia and that no collusion had been proved with his Republican campaign.
Panetta told Blitzer that McMaster was not in Germany to "make political comments or to try to engage in the political dispute about collusion and no collusion.
"That's not his job.
"He's a United States military officer, a general whose responsibility is to deal with national security issues," he said of McMaster, an active-duty Army officer.
"The president ought to recognize that."
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