Former CIA Chief: Trump Right to Needle NATO

President Donald Trump was right to needle NATO leaders on defense spending, as he did in a multilateral meeting with European and Canadian leaders in Brussels, Belgium.

So says former CIA chief James Woolsey, who served as top spy under President Bill Clinton from 1993 to 1995.

“Most NATO nations do slack off in what their obligations are, and let [the United States] do everything.”

Speaking on “The Laura Ingraham Show” on Friday morning, Woolsey said that NATO nations often slip under their mandated defense spending levels, as encouraged by the 1949 treaty.

“I think [Trump] is wise to needle them about it,” said Woolsey. “He needs [NATO]. They may take some time and come up a little bit slowly in their percentages. But it’s OK to needle them. Most of them do slack off in what their obligations are, and let [the United States] do everything.”

NATO nations are supposed to spend 2 percent of their gross domestic product on defense. Trump noted on Thursday, at a NATO event in Brussels, that 23 of 28 NATO members do not meet that threshold.

Trump has long said that when NATO nations skimp, the U.S. has to make up for the deficit — by spending more on defense and intelligence services in Europe and Canada.

Of the 28 nations, only the United States, the United Kingdom, Greece, Estonia, and Poland are spending 2 percent or more of their GDP on an annual basis.

France spends 1.78 percent. Germany, a wealthy nation that could be a much stronger buffer against Russian aggression, only spends 1.2 percent of its GDP on defense. And Canada doesn’t even break 1 percent.

Trump scolded NATO at a gathering of the 29 leaders at NATO headquarters. (Montenegro will join NATO in June.)

“Over the last eight years, the United States spent more on defense than all other NATO nations combined,” Trump said. “If all NATO members had spent just two percent of their (gross domestic product) on defense last year, we would have had another $119 billion for our collective defense and for the financing of additional NATO reserves.”

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On other issues of the day, Woolsey also said that some of the spying on American citizens under former President Barack Obama’s regime was illegal, if reports are true.

Ingraham said Fourth Amendment rights of Americans may have been violated when spy agencies looked at internet searches of U.S. citizens. The agencies admitted such behavior to courts in October, but reports on the behavior just began hitting newspapers.

Woolsey cited a Supreme Court case that allowed federal and state investigators and intelligence agents to “look at the outside of the envelope,” but not to look inside without proper warrants. But Woolsey said he was disturbed by reports that intelligence agencies and investigators went further than that, collecting data that went beyond the outside of the envelope.

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The same is true of emails. The spy agencies can look at “metadata,” or such data as where the email is going.

“If they do it right, that is legal,” said Woolsey.

But if reports are true, U.S. spy agencies may have looked at “inside” data without warrants or proper authority.

“That’s just shameful,” said Woolsey. “That’s the opposite of what we are about as a country.”