On Monday, former CIA Director Mike Pompeo spoke on Glenn Beck’s radio program and addressed recent reports that the CIA and Trump Administration considered kidnapping and assassinating WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
Pompeo’s comments: Pompeo called into Glenn Beck’s radio program on Monday and undermined the authors and sources of a recent report by Yahoo! News that Pompeo and Trump contemplated the kidnapping and assassination of Julian Assange.
When questioned by Beck about the reports, Pompeo had this to say: “First of all, Isikoff, we’ve seen he was a big Russia hoax perpetrator. So take that for what it’s worth. Second, there are many stories out there now about how the president and I were engaged in things that were crazy, right? There was talk about there was an effort to drop a nuclear weapon on China in the last week of the administration. This story is of that same ilk, right? I couldn’t tell you who they have as their sources, but those sources didn’t know what we were doing.”
Without directly addressing whether he and the Trump Administration considered kidnapping and assassinating Assange, Pompeo finished his response by stating:
“The third point… we were very worried about the fact that we had bad actors who were stealing really, really sensitive material from the United States, and I make no apologies for the fact that we, and the administration, were working diligently to make sure that we were able to protect this important sensitive information, whether it was cyber actors in Russia, or the Chinese military, or anyone who was trying to take this information away from us. Not just commercial stuff, like intellectual property theft, but real national security secrets. So we were working hard to go after those bad actors who were trying to do that.”
How we got here: Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has been a CIA target for years because of his leaks of highly classified government information, but he became of renewed interest in 2017 when WikiLeaks released a cache of CIA hacking tools.
Government officials have called the 2017 leak “the largest data loss in CIA history.”
Following the leak, Pompeo labeled Wikileaks “a non-state hostile intelligence service.”
Pompeo confirmed his assessment of Wikileaks in the interview with Beck, stating: “So I came to believe that they were, in fact, one of the first, non-state hostile intelligence entities.They weren’t engaged in even crappy reporting, like Isikoff does. They were engaged in active efforts to steal secrets themselves, and pay others to do the same in a way that violated the central understandings that I think the American people get, and second, violated U.S. law as well. We were always careful. I’m all about a big, bold, strong First Amendment. But these folks were acting in ways that were deeply inconsistent with that.”
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