Trump once said ‘I love WikiLeaks’ - now his CIA chief brands it ‘hostile’ and vows to take action
CIA Director Mike Pompeo calls WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange ‘a fraud, a coward’ - in sharp contrast to previous praise from Donald Trump
CIA Director Mike Pompeo on Thursday called the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks a hostile intelligence service and said the group would soon face decisive US action to stifle its disclosures of leaked material.
“It ends now,” Pompeo said in his first public remarks after 10 weeks on the job, indicating that President Donald Trump will take undefined but forceful action.
Pompeo lashed out aggressively against Julian Assange, the Australian founder of WikiLeaks — who has been holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy in London for nearly five years — calling him a narcissist and “a fraud, a coward hiding behind a screen”.
The broadside against Assange and WikiLeaks marked a sharp about-face toward Assange, whom Trump once applauded for publishing emails stolen from 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign. The CIA, hurt by a recent WikiLeaks disclosure of purported stolen spying tools, is elevating WikiLeaks into a high-profile target.
“WikiLeaks walks like a hostile intelligence service and talks like a hostile intelligence service. It has encouraged its followers to find jobs at CIA in order to obtain intelligence,” Pompeo said.