John Negroponte, who served as director of national intelligence under former President George W. Bush, endorsed former Vice President Joe Biden in his race against President Trump on Thursday in an interview with the Daily Beast.
“All roads lead to Trump in a way,” Negroponte told the website. “I’m just not sure the country can withstand another four years of the presidency with a man who has shown such disregard to the office.”
“The real issue for Americans is whether Biden has the character, compassion and life experience needed to represent the United States as president and the requisite respect for the office to which he aspires,” he added. “He beats Mr. Trump on these attributes hands down.”
Negroponte, who also served as United Nations ambassador during the Bush administration, is the latest of several prominent Republicans to endorse the Democratic nominee. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell and former Ohio Gov. John Kasich both spoke in support of Biden at the Democratic National Convention earlier this week.
In the Daily Best interview, Negroponte also defended the warrantless collection of Americans’ data during his time as director of national intelligence.
“I am very comfortable with the role I played and the positions I took and the positions that I defended during that time,” he said. “Don’t forget, that was then, and in those days, we were responding to an attack against the United States that resulted in the killing of 3,000 people and we had this whole issue of a global ‘War on Terror.’ ”
Although Biden, then a senator, backed the Bush administration on the war in Iraq, he was critical of domestic surveillance of Americans’ phone calls in 2006.
“I don’t have to listen to your phone calls to know what you’re doing,” Biden said at the time. “If I know every single phone call that you made, I am able to determine every single person you talked to. I can get a pattern about your life that is very, very intrusive.”
The clip resurfaced in 2013 after federal contractor Edward Snowden revealed the bulk collection of phone metadata conducted by the agency.
The 2020 Democratic platform calls for an end to “the type of warrantless surveillance of American citizens that flourished during the Bush administration.”