Former CIA director James Woolsey, who advised Donald Trump during his campaign and transition, used unfolding news of the deadly attack in Manchester, England, to slam the president’s predecessor, Barack Obama.
In comments that Media Matters posted online, Woolsey told Fox News anchor Shepard Smith:
“Things are kind of coming to a head. I think the radical Islamists ― and I would call them that ― have decided to pick up the pace with the terrorist attacks, and I think we’ll probably see some more.
And we now have a president who is pretty straightforward that he is at war with them. He’s not going to soft-pedal that. He calls them evil. And we haven’t had a situation like that. We did not have in the eight years of the Obama administration a president who wanted to fight and win a war.”
Smith cut him off.
“President Obama fought a number of wars and certainly didn’t say that he didn’t want to win them,” he said. “It’s very early, Mr. Woolsey, with great respect, it’s very early to make this a political matter.”
Woolsey continued.
“He didn’t say that he didn’t want to win them, but I think that’s the way he behaved,” he said. “Seems to me that’s pretty straightforward.”
Woolsey, who was CIA director under former President Bill Clinton, joined the Trump campaign in September and served on the transition team until a couple of weeks before the transition, when he resigned amid what The Washington Post called “growing tensions over Trump’s vision for intelligence agencies.”
