CIA Director Mike Pompeo on Thursday said that Wikileaks is “a non-state hostile intelligence service,” though on the campaign trail President Donald Trump praised the organization for publishing information undercutting Hillary Clinton.
“Wikileaks walks like a hostile intelligence service and talks like a hostile intelligence service,” Pompeo said in a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, his first public remarks since being sworn in as CIA director.
Pompeo said that Wikileaks “has encouraged its followers to find jobs at the CIA in order to obtain intelligence.”
“It overwhelmingly focuses on the United States while seeking support from anti-democratic countries and organizations,” he said. “It’s time to call out Wikileaks for what it really is: a non-state hostile intelligence service often embedded by state actors like Russia.”
Trump often cited Wikileaks on the campaign trail. By ThinkProgress’ count, he mentioned the organization at least 164 times in 2016 in the month before Election Day.
“I’ll tell you, this Wikileaks stuff is unbelievable,” Trump said in October, and added on a separate occasion: “We love Wikileaks. Wikileaks. They have revealed a lot.”
And the hostile intelligence service in question is called GRU.
And it took Director Pompous this long to figure that out? Not much central intelligence there, I guess.
And the hostile intelligence service was used and praised by the t rump campaign just a short time ago. Wikileaks was on their side. They loved wikileaks.
This makes me wonder if there might be a new document dump that paints a very unfavorable image of t rump and the republican party quite soon. They are distancing themselves in advance.
Oh man, the coming Glenn Greenwald hysterical primal shriek of scorn over this obvious truth from the hard right head of the CIA ought to be priceless.