Appearing on CNN on Saturday morning, former CIA official Phil Mudd dismissed Donald Trump's claim that his choice to fill the Director of National Intelligence post was the result of the media picking apart the background of Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-TX).
Speaking with host Victor Blackwell, Mudd said that intelligence experts were not pleased with the selection of the Trump loyalist and that the president was barking up the wrong tree about why Ratcliffe's nomination crashed and burned after only five days.
"When you look what the Ratcliffe said, people in the intelligence business are immediately going to say if he ever gets nominated and confirmed, is he going to represent the president's view or the view of the intelligence?" Mudd explained. "That's what got [outgoing DNI hed] Dan Coats on the side with the president, he's a respected Republican, but the president got tired of it."
"I think there's a lot of shoddy work here," Mudd continued. "You look at the parallel with the physician, the president's personal physician [Dr. Ronny Jackson], who gives him a clean bill of health and all of a sudden, the president saying he ought to be the Secretary of Veterans Affairs?"
"And if it were about the media, they would have pulled Brett Kavanaugh's nomination," he added. "The media was much tougher on Brett Kavanaugh, I thought. In the short five days we had to look at this nomination -- I tell you it's not the media. What happened in this case, from the media reports, Republicans on the Hill said 'D'on't keep going, we don't think this guy is confirmable."
"It wasn't the media, it was people from the president's own party telling him 'You've got to pull this one," he concluded.
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