Independent presidential candidate Evan McMullin Thursday slammed GOP nominee Donald Trump as being a "weak man" and a "weak candidate" and called his campaign a "train wreck," while pointing out that there are many challenges when it comes to the nation's intelligence services.
"The truth is that intelligence isn't always correct, and anyone who has experience with it understands that," McMullin, a former CIA agent with experience in the Middle East, told Fox News' "Happening Now" program. "I would say that Donald Trump has zero credibility left on anything."
Earlier this week, Trump told Fox News that he doubts many of the nation's intelligence experts, given the events in recent years.
But McMullin defended the record of the nation's intelligence services.
"You're connecting dots that are incomplete, and you're looking for information that is trying to be concealed from you," said McMullin. "These are the challenges of intelligence and the president understands that, but the reality is our intelligence services and our special forces and military have been tremendously successful at stopping many attacks against this country and preventing all kinds of threats from reaching our homeland ever since 9/11, certainly, and we need to honor their service and work to leverage what they bring to the table."
McMullin is a former CIA operative who focused on counterterrorism in the Middle East, spending more than a decade in that service, and also served as a volunteer refugee resettlement officer in Jordan through the United Nations and said the process to vet refugees is very misunderstood.
He also commented that if he were to be elected president, he would handle things much differently than President Barack Obama did in Syria.
"If I drew a red line, that line would be enforced," said McMullin. "President Obama made a terrible mistake when he drew a red line around [President Bashar al-] Assad's chemical attack around civilians and didn't back it up."
He said he learned in the CIA that dictators take their clues from world leaders' behavior, and when Obama didn't back up the red line, that gave Assad "the green light to continue attacks on Syrian civilians, which has resulted in this massive refugee crisis."
The matter is repairable, said McMullin, but matters get harder when the president doesn't handle ISIS.
The refugee crisis, he continued, is the "biggest humanitarian disaster since World War II. We as a collective, the international community must respond and the leadership must come from the United States."