Pompeo: ‘Of Course’ Russians Will Attempt To Interfere In Midterms

“Of course” Russia will attempt to interfere in the 2018 midterm elections, CIA Director Mike Pompeo told the BBC in an interview aired Monday.

“I have every expectation that they will continue to try and do that,” Pompeo said. “But I am confident that America will be able to have a free and fair election, that we’ll push back in a way that is sufficiently robust, that the impact that they will have on our election won’t be great.”

Pompeo, a former Republican congressman from Kansas and a Trump ally, said in June that Russia had been attempting to undermine America’s democratic processes for decades and that “this election was meddled with by the Russians in a way that is frankly not particularly original” and “in some ways, there’s no news.”

He echoed that sentiment to the BBC, saying “the Russians have a long history of these information campaigns. That part of it’s not new.”

But, he continued, “the technology that enables it is now cheap and plentiful and the capability of transferring information around the world is much simpler than it was in World War II or decades ago. This threat is not going to go away.”

“The Russians have been at this a long time and I fully expect they’ll continue to be at it,” Pompeo said.

“I haven’t seen a significant decrease in their activity,” he said separately, quoted by the BBC.

Asked if he had to walk a “fine line” given the President’s dismissal of investigations into Russian meddling in the 2016 election as “fake news,” Pompeo said “I don’t do fine lines. I do the truth.”