Defection: Bill Clinton’s CIA Director James Woolsey Joins Donald Trump’s Campaign As Senior Adviser
NEW YORK — Former President Bill Clinton’s one-time CIA director James Woolsey is officially working for the Donald Trump campaign as senior adviser, coming out against his old boss’s wife, Democratic nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton.
“I have been a ‘Scoop Jackson,’ ‘Joe Lieberman,’ Democrat all of my adult life, but I am pleased to be asked to participate with others I respect in advising GOP candidate Donald J. Trump on the urgent need to reinvest in and modernize our military in order to confront the challenges of the 21st century,” Woolsey said in a statement released by the Trump campaign.
“Trump’s commitment to reversing the harmful defense budget cuts signed into law by the current administration, while acknowledging the need for debt reduction, is an essential step toward reinstating the United States’ primacy in the conventional and digital battlespace.”
Woolsey, who served as Bill Clinton’s first CIA director from 1993 to 1995, says that as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, “demonstrated a complete lack of understanding and an inability to lead the agency she headed in such a way as to maintain its mission and security.”
“Based on the emails thus far released we know that Secretary Clinton also lacks the ability to lead her senior managers while complying with and maintaining the basic protocols designed to protect our government’s sensitive and classified information,” Woolsey said. “Trump understands the magnitude of the threats we face and is holding his cards close to the vest.”
Woolsey also appeared on CNN to push his decision to advise the Trump campaign against his old bosses.
He tells the network Trump and his campaign “got in touch last Friday and he and I met briefly and I agreed to advise him on, I’m sure, principally if not exclusively national security such as matters of intelligence, maybe some aspects of energy.”
“Trump has come out on two things that I think are important: first of all, he seems to be very much more so than his opponent in favor of a strong defense budget and we’ve got a lot of space to make up problems that have been left in defense by the Obama administration,” Woolsey said when asked to explain why he supports Trump over Clinton.
“The other is that he seems willing to keep a secret and not to blab everything to the public and to our opponents when he comes up with something about national security that ought to be kept quiet. I think that’s good. You can’t go yakking about everything that you’re interested in, you have to keep your counsel.”
Woolsey becomes just the latest in a long line of high profile Democrats rejecting their party’s backing of her and instead publicly backing Trump. Retired Army Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, another lifelong Democrat who served for two years as the director of President Barack Obama’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), has rejected Clinton and is one of Trump’s highest-profile backers. And many, many more–as part of the Trumpocrats movement–are leaving the Democratic Party to instead support Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton.