[Hillary Clinton] never misused [ information that the Central Intelligence Agency has]. She always protected it. I would trust her with the crown jewels of the United States government. And, more importantly, I would trust her with the future security of the country and the future security of my kids.

If you were watching CNN, they were saying the NSA is listening to your phone calls. It's reading your emails. When you call your grandma in Arkansas, the NSA knows. All total bulls - t. They made the public more concerned about the privacy issue than the legitimate facts should have done.

ISIS went to school on how we were collecting intelligence on terrorist organizations by using telecommunications technologies. And when they learned that from the [Edward] Snowden disclosures, they were able to adapt to it and essentially go silent.

I'm concerned, too, about ISIS' ability, right, to infiltrate people. But we have got some very effective, robust processes for vetting people. We brought in thousands of Iraqi refugees after the Iraq War. Not a single one has ever turned out to be a terrorist because the vetting was so good.

The thing we've learned from the last 20 years of counterterrorism is the significant value you get from removing leadership from the battlefield in degrading the organization.

You have to have a military and intelligence approach to removing leadership that results in rapid frequent removals from the battlefield. It's got to be one, two a week, not just one or two every three or four months.

Look at it from [Vladimir] Putin's perspective, right. He's a trained intelligence officer, worked for the KGB, very talented, manipulated people much smarter than Donald Trump. He played this perfectly, right. He saw that Donald Trump wanted to be complimented.