'Like we've changed sides': Ex-chief appalled by Trump response to China cyberattacks

A former high-ranking intelligence official expressed alarm over President Donald Trump's comments following his high-stakes summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

Sue Gordon, who resigned as deputy director of national intelligence during Trump's first term, told MS NOW's Nicolle Wallace she was concerned with the president's indifferent attitude to Chinese companies stealing American intellectual property.

“We do things, and they do things, and that’s the way it is,” Trump told Fox News’ Sean Hannity about protections for U.S. companies. “I’d like to see it taken care of. But they’ve been doing that for 50 years.”

Gordon, who stepped down Aug. 9, 2019, when she was passed over as national intelligence director, stated that the president was wrong, saying the U.S. imposed a "bright line between our government and our private sector," but Wallace asked whether that was still true during Trump's second term.

"Well, I guess, it's a great point – thanks for depressing me even further today," Gordon answered. "I'm just going to say that there is a difference, yes. On one level, spying is what, a really old profession, and it has been one of the great tools of strategic advantage for nations, nations worldwide for the longest time since Gettysburg and before that. But we are a nation of laws, and I've lived in this world, and I haven't seen that those laws have gone away, and they do."

"They do create boundaries, and also just intellectually, we have had a bright line between what I'm going to call civilian casualties, even that to include economic casualty, and there just is, you know, we we don't go trooping into Chinese companies and steal their intellectual property," she added. "We just, that isn't for the same reason we don't go trooping into our companies and steal intellectual property. So he's wrong about that."

Gordon argued that Chinese law was very different on intellectual property.

"There is a difference, and probably the most concrete difference is that they have national security laws that insist that every Chinese citizen or company, when asked, must provide their information that they have of any data of somebody else's that goes through, and we don't – that isn't our law, so it isn't the same," Gordon said. "I reject the notion that it's the same. Now, if it's being done differently by some people and it hasn't been discovered yet, but just intellectually, it's a different thing."

"That's exactly the impact with our allies and partners," she added. "It's like we've changed sides."

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Former Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence Sue Gordon is sounding the alarm about America's standing in the world in the wake of the Trump-Xi summit and the quagmire in Iran.