This is all we need. A partisan hack as CIA director, 100% in thrall to Trump apparently. This is really bad news, on top of the exhibition by Kelly.
CIA Director Mike Pompeo declared Thursday that U.S. intelligence agencies determined that Russia’s interference in the 2016 American presidential election did not alter the outcome, a statement that distorted spy agency findings.
“The intelligence community’s assessment is that the Russian meddling that took place did not affect the outcome of the election,” Pompeo said at a security conference in Washington.
His comment suggested — falsely — that a report released by U.S. intelligence agencies in January had ruled out any impact that could be attributed to a covert Russian interference campaign that involved leaks of tens of thousands of stolen emails, the flooding of social media sites with false claims and the purchase of ads on Facebook.
A report compiled by the CIA and other agencies described that Russian operation as unprecedented in its scale and concluded that Moscow’s goals were to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process and help elect Donald Trump.
But the report reached no conclusions about whether that interference had altered the outcome — an issue that U.S. intelligence officials made clear was considered beyond the scope of their inquiry.
I am getting nervous.
I remembered Pompeo from the endless Benghazi hearings and was upset when he was proposed for CIA. He was clearly biased and now he’s proving that he shouldn’t be CIA director. Of course none of the Cabinet heads should be running their departments in my opinion. Some are worse than others — and Sessions as AG is an insult to the national intelligence as well as our Constitution.
But we have to be able to trust the CIA not to be partisan. Bad intel, perhaps massaged to suit the GOP agenda got us into Iraq. The results have been horrendous. Now it appears that an apologist for Trump, which means an apologist for Putin, and white supremacists; and the Klan; and the Nazis is running CIA and that could have even worse consequences.
For starters this makes it even more difficult for Robert Mueller. If he brings a cast iron case and people like Kelly and Pompeo are covering up for Trump how are their supporters ever going to be convinced? Kelly’s appearance today was disturbing. Any hope we had of Kelly being a counter-balance to Trump just went out the window I think. When a sitting general attacks a member of Congress like that it’s highly inappropriate. Sessions all but threatened journalists the other day in the Senate hearing. All down the line norms and rules are being broken.
Trump gave himself a 10 today on the Puerto Rico situation. That is so absurd one can’t even describe HOW absurd it is.
Also, I am beginning to wonder just how deep the corruption is here. If Flynn was compromised, a former DIA, and Trump is obviously so in bed with Russian oligarchs he should be living in Moscow, maybe Pompeo is too? Do we need to mistrust the head of CIA too?
I’m worried. The Big Lie is being so commonplace in this regime it’s rare when they DON’T lie.
Worse yet, they are doing NOTHING to prevent the next election from being hacked, the voters disenfranchised and the results sullied. More stolen elections and our democracy is officially dead. As it is we are on life support. It’s naive of us, I hate to say it, to count on 2018 and 2020 to right this wrong. If they succeed on destroying elections, with our without foreign help, we don’t count period. And this explains how they’re able to get away with such an extreme agenda in the first place — Trump’s evil budget just passed the Senate, making way for the tax cuts that would devastate the safety nets, remove any hope of building new infrastructure, and destroy health care altogether as it further increases inequality.
www.washingtonpost.com/...