'Unforced error': Former CIA official says White House just 'gave the Chinese a gift'

A former counterterrorism official explained the risks created by Donald Trump's vendetta against the CIA and FBI, and said the president and his team had committed a major error.

The CIA sent an unclassified email to the White House containing the first names and last initials for all new hires over the last two years as part of an executive order aimed at slashing the federal workforce, and national security expert Phil Mudd told CNN said those disclosures could allow Chinese and Russian spies to identify those individuals.

"You just gave the Chinese a gift," Mudd said. "You're going to conceal that stuff, not because of first name and last initial means a lot to a regular American citizen, but what the Chinese will do and other services will do is take that and combine that with other open source information. Let's be really simple, let me give you an example. Somebody who identifies himself as an analyst on Facebook without saying what agency they're with, and they have the same first name and last initial that's on that list. That's one bit of data you might use if you're the Chinese, and they've got a million other bits of data, they're going to try to use this as a phone book."

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Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT), the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, issued a statement alleging the White House "insisted" on transmitting the list of employees in an unclassified email, but Mudd was a bit more generous in his assessment.

"So, I mean, I'm not going to lose sleep over it, but that is an unforced error, as we would say in tennis," said Mudd, who served in both the CIA and FBI. "I mean, you hit the net with that one because you didn't even try to get it over the net – that's embarrassing, and it could be a substantial risk to a person who just joined the agency in terms of buyouts. Let me give you a simple sort of layman's response to that. Good luck with that, you joined the service of the CIA – it's an interesting job. It's not well paid, but it's interesting, and it's not just a job, it's a mission. You're in Washington, D.C., you're traveling around the world trying to understand what the Chinese, the Russians, the Iranians, the North Koreans are doing, and somebody comes in and says, here's some chump change to retire. Good luck with that. I don't think they'll get a lot of success with that, and then the question will be, what's the next step? Are they going to fire people? Try that one, too."

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