David Miller, a former State Department official and a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said it's "ironic that several of the things Trump has castigated likely helped secure this victory" – including CIA intelligence, Kurdish cooperation, and the U.S. counterterrorism troop presence in Syria.

Miller said he found Trump's praise of the intelligence community, in particular, to be quite ironic: "It’s the very professional intelligence community that he constantly derides that’s helped him claim credit for killing Baghdadi."

Trump has clashed repeatedly with intelligence officials throughout his presidency, mostly over two high-profile investigations.

One is Russian interference in the 2016 election to benefit the Trump; the other is the ongoing impeachment inquiry that centers on Trump's own dealings with the president of Ukraine.

"When we use our intelligencecorrectly, what we can do is incredible," Trump told reporters Sunday. "When we waste our time with intelligence that hurts our country, because we had poor leadership at the top, that's not good."

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Since the election, Trump has periodically questioned the intelligence community's assessment that Russia did indeed seek to influence 2016 in his favor by hacking prominent Democrats and pushing fakes news about candidate Hillary Clinton.

The president has accused Barack Obama-era intelligence officials – such as former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former CIA Director John Brennan – of somehow conspiring to pin the Russia plot on him.

Brennan, a frequent critic of Trump, weighed in