[Vladimir Putin] complimented him. That led Donald Trump to then compliment Vladimir Putin and to defend Vladimir Putin's actions in a number of places around the world.

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.

Donald Trump didn't even understand, right, that [Vladimir] Putin was playing him. So, in Putin's mind, I have no doubt that Putin thinks that he's an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation, although Putin would never say that.

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.

The [Edward] Snowden disclosures created this perception that people's privacy was being put at significant risk.

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.

The one thing that struck me right off the bat was what Donald Trump said about Benghazi.There is this view out there that [Hillary Clinton] lied about what caused the attack, that she said it was the video.