Evelyn Farkas appeared on Greater Boston to set the record straight.
Farkas, the former assistant deputy of defense for Russia under the Obama administration, has become a target for Trump supporters after she admitted on MSBNC's 'Morning Joe' earlier this month that she knew about Obama officials' attempt to gather and preserve evidence regarding Russian intelligence hacks.
"I was urging my former colleagues, and frankly speaking, the people on the Hill ... get as much information as you can, get as much intelligence as you can, before President Obama leaves the administration, because I had a fear that ... the Trump folks, if they found out how we knew what we knew about their — the Trump staff's dealing with Russians — that they would compromise those sources and methods," she told 'Morning Joe' host Mika Brzezinski.
While critics have said that this information is the smoking gun that suggests there was at least an attempt to surveil the Trump camp, Farkas says otherwise.
"I never mentioned surveillance, I never mentioned leaking, I never mentioned hacking," she told host Jim Braude. "I was worried after the election, once I saw that, OK, Trump was going into the White House, he would now be the custodian of the classified information."
Farkas added that all she was trying to communicate to Obama officials and people on Capitol Hill was "make sure you share the data, the facts, whatever facts you have on this."
"It wasn't advocating for anybody tapping, leaking, spying, anything of that nature," she said.
Farkas left the Obama administration in 2015 and is now a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.
Jim Braude and Evelyn Farkas were joined by Jim Walsh, a senior research associate at MIT's Security Studies Program. You can watch their entire interview on the investigations into the Russia issues here.
