Ex-NSA Chief Mike Rogers: Trump Should Have Confronted Putin on Election Meddling

Former National Security Agency chief Mike Rogers said in his first public remarks since leaving his post in June that he wishes President Donald Trump would have used the Helsinki Summit to confront Russian President Vladimir Putin on election meddling.

“I thought there was an opportunity there that I wish we would have taken advantage of,” the retired rear admiral told a think tank in Virginia. “He opted to go in a different direction and that certainly is his right… but I wish we had taken advantage of that.”

Rogers also said, according to the Daily Beast, that as part of his role he would give Trump briefings on Russian hacking.

In response, he recalled, Trump would say, “Mike, you know I’m in a different place.”

Rogers did not clarify what Trump meant by a “different place” but he did offer what he said in response.

“Sir, this isn’t about politics, it isn’t about party, it’s about a foreign state that is attempting to subvert the very tenets of our structure,” he recalled saying to POTUS.

On Wednesday, Trump signed an executive order authorizing sanctions on any country that meddles in elections here in the United States.

During a press briefing on Wednesday, the current national security advisor John Bolton said that the executive order, which comes shortly before the midterms “is intended to be a very broad effort to prevent foreign manipulation of the political process.”

Watch more above, via CNN.

[image via screengrab]