President Donald Trump was not successful in his attempt to clarify remarks he made during a press conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin, former FBI Director Michael Hayden said Wednesday.
Hayden told CNN's "New Day" co-anchor Alisyn Camerota, “If that press op that you just showed the president having yesterday was supposed to set things right with the intelligence community, it just made things worse.”
On Tuesday, Trump said he accepted the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment that Russia interfered in the 2016 election, although at a press conference with Putin on Monday, he said, “I don’t see any reason why it would be.”
Trump backtracked his remarks by saying, “The sentence should have been, ‘I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia.’”
“The original sentence is absolutely consistent with all the other things President Trump said wrapped around that particular sentence. It’s consistent with what he’s been saying over the course of the last two years,” said Hayden.
“What you had was frankly a hostage video with the president under duress, saying what he had to say to meet the needs of the people who, off camera, were making demands. And that was probably his immediate staff and certain the director of national intelligence.
“I’m speaking on behalf of the intelligence community. All that showed was that once again the president will say anything that he believes will suit his needs for the precise moment in which he is located. It is not anchored on anything outside of himself and his immediate needs,” Hayden said.
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