President Donald Trump's revised order on travel from the Middle East is undergoing a much better implementation and has changed several of the aspects that led to it being blocked before, but former CIA and NSA Director Michael Hayden said Tuesday he still doesn't think the order was needed.
"You have one equation, that there was a real danger from immigrants, and frankly, I think that was badly overhyped during the [2016 Trump] campaign, in particular with regard to refugees," Hayden told Fox News' "America's Newsroom" anchor Bill Hemmer.
Trump had warned that nobody knew who the refugees were, he continued, but the fact is, "we do."
"We're talking about Syrian refugees," said Hayden. "We let in a total of 10,000 last year. Eighty-five percent were women and children, and the average processing time for all 10,000 ranged between 18 and 24 months. That's extreme vetting. I don't think we needed to do this."
There is also the "human effect" on refugees and immigrants, he continued, and that also concerns him, as there is "that group within Islam [that] just had their position strengthened because we acted the way they said we would act, that we don't like Muslims."
Hayden said he does, however, congratulate the Trump administration for "working hard to reduce the ill effects and the actual implementation" of the ban.
Hayden also commented about Trump's tweets accusing former President Barack Obama of wiretapping his campaign at Trump Tower, saying the president does not have the authority to do so.
"The core of the tweet is beyond wrong," said Hayden. "It's impossible. Now, other people can do it in the government to go to a judge to get the warrant. We have two kinds of warrants to do that. One for foreign intelligence purposes and the other for counterintelligence and law enforcement."
Hayden, speaking later on MSNBC's "Andrea Mitchell Reports," commented on the WikiLeaks release of purported CIA documents, saying that if the document dump is "what it pretends to be," it could be "very damaging."
"This is about foreign intelligence collection," said Hayden. "It doesn't invoke the privacy rights of Americans, and isn't it surprising that WikiLeaks, this transparency engine, seems to be focused on transparency only about the United States of America and its friends, not totalitarian regimes around the world?"