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.

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.

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

I want the vetting to be solid. But I also want to bring these people in because not bringing them in sends a message, right, to the Muslim world and plays into the ISIS narrative and the Al Qaeda narrative, right, that this is a war between religions. And we can't have that.

[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.

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.

One great lesson from history we need to keep on re-learning. It is that sometimes your adversaries tell you exactly what they're going to do. How many times did [Osama] bin Laden say prior to 9/11 that he was coming after the U.S.? ISIS made clear that when they established their caliphate in Iraq and Syria, they were coming after the United States too.