Corporate media networks have turned to former intelligence and defense officials to criticize President Donald Trump’s recent diplomatic efforts to bring an end to the Russia-Ukraine war.
Trump hosted a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday and then welcomed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni to the White House on Monday for discussions on peace.
CNN and MSNBC have featured several former officials who previously advanced discredited narratives, including on the Hunter Biden laptop and the Steele Dossier, to question Trump’s strategy.
Former National Security Adviser John Bolton appeared on CNN’s The Source with Kaitlan Collins on August 8, where he criticized the decision to host Putin in the United States.
“The only better place for Putin than Alaska would be if the summit were being held in Moscow,” Bolton said.
“So, the initial setup, I think, is a great victory for Putin. He’s a rogue leader of a pariah state, and he’s going to be welcomed into the United States.”
Looks like Putin’s got his old magic back with Trump. His disappointment and outrage with Putin are gone. A Putin-Trump summit in former Russia-America, Alaska, is not quite as bad as Trump inviting the Taliban to Camp David, but certainly reminds one of that. pic.twitter.com/oK81qRcFNG
— John Bolton (@AmbJohnBolton) August 9, 2025
Bolton has been a longtime critic of Trump.
In September 2019, Trump announced that he had requested Bolton’s resignation, stating he “disagreed strongly with many of his suggestions, as did others in the Administration.”
Trump later told the Daily Caller in June 2020 that Bolton was a “dumb maniac who wants to go to war with any anybody that can breathe.”
Their disputes went back to June 2019, when Trump halted a missile strike against Iran following the downing of a U.S. Navy drone.
The president’s decision reportedly went against Bolton’s preference for a military response.
Another critic, former CIA Director Leon Panetta, appeared on CNN’s The Arena on Tuesday. Panetta questioned the effectiveness of Trump’s peace strategy, suggesting it lacked preparation and results.
“One of my concerns about all of these meetings is just how much preparation is actually going into these meetings in order to try to achieve some conclusion,” he said.
“And if all you’re doing is meeting to be meeting, and not really knowing where you’re headed, you know, the chances are Putin’s going to succeed here in just playing for time.”
Panetta added, “I think it’s very important, if you’re going to deal with somebody like Putin, that you have to be credible. And I think the president has hurt himself on his credibility here. He said he wanted a ceasefire. He didn’t get it. He said he was going to implement sanctions. That didn’t happen. He said if he didn’t get what he wanted, there was going to be severe consequences. That has not happened.”
Panetta was one of 51 intelligence officials who signed an October 2020 letter dismissing the Hunter Biden laptop as having “the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
Multiple outlets, including the Daily Caller News Foundation, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, have since authenticated the laptop’s contents.
Former CIA Director John Brennan, now a senior analyst at MSNBC, also criticized Trump’s approach on The Weeknight Monday.
Brennan said Trump was undermining credibility in both his leadership and the United States’.
“I think Donald Trump continues to show that he is really a very unserious statesman,” Brennan said.
“The fact that a president of the United States sits in the Oval Office and meets with a foreign leader, President Zelensky, and then disparages his own predecessor, Joe Biden, calling him a horrible, corrupt president, he undermines the credibility of the United States. Not only his own credibility, but the credibility of the United States itself, because he has demonstrated that he is willing to just change course on a whim.”
Brennan also signed the Hunter Biden laptop letter and has faced scrutiny for his role in the Russia 2016 election investigation under former President Barack Obama.
In February 2018, Brennan said on NBC’s Meet the Press that the Steele Dossier “did not play any role whatsoever in the intelligence community assessments that was presented to then President Obama and then President-elect Trump.”
However, a 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) noted that Putin interfered in the 2016 election with “a clear preference” for Trump.
A later CIA review determined that Brennan pushed to include the Steele Dossier in the assessment.
Declassified documents and later reporting revealed the dossier was added as a separate annex to a highly classified version of the ICA at the insistence of the FBI.
Brennan, in a July 30 New York Times opinion piece co-authored with former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, argued that the annex explained why the dossier was not used in the assessment’s conclusions.
Brennan is reportedly under criminal investigation for potential misconduct related to the dossier, according to Fox News Digital.
Despite the criticisms, Trump has highlighted peace deals achieved during his second term, including agreements between India and Pakistan, Thailand and Cambodia, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Azerbaijan and Armenia.
