A former CIA counterterrorism deputy ripped into President Donald Trump on Tuesday for what he called a “disgusting” speech at the agency’s headquarters.
Trump used his speech Saturday in front of the Memorial Wall, where stars represent agents killed in action, to attack the media, boast of his inauguration crowd and brag about his intellect.
Later, he also crowed about the standing ovation he received ― which was actually due to the fact he never told the crowd to sit.
“You almost want to cry,” Philip Mudd, now a counterterrorism analyst for CNN, told Wolf Blitzer on Tuesday night. “There’s a sense of outrage, but there’s also such a sense of sadness. Those aren’t stars; those are people.”
He added:
“We have a president who has to talk about how many times he’s been on the Time magazine cover in comparison to a football player. He’s got to talk about how many people showed up at his inauguration. He’s got to talk about how many people in the CIA enjoyed his speech. That’s what we get to honor the people who lost their lives.”
Mudd said Trump should have used the speech to talk about the future of American security and honor those who sacrificed themselves in the line of duty. Mudd is a former deputy director of the CIA Counterterrorist Center.
“It’s disgusting, Wolf, I don’t know what else to say. You can’t do that if you’re the president.”
Mudd, who had previously slammed the Trump transition effort as a “clown show,” is the latest former agency bigwig to openly criticize the president’s speech.
On Saturday, former CIA Director John Brennan said he was “deeply saddened and angered” by Trump’s “despicable display of self-aggrandizement” and that the president “should be ashamed of himself.”
This article has been updated to include additional details about Mudd’s position within the CIA.
