At the urging of President Donald Trump, CIA Director Mike Pompeo met final month with a former U.S. intelligence official who advocates a fringe principle that the hack of the Democrats throughout the election was an inside job and never the work of Russian intelligence, the previous official instructed NBC News.
“He’s trying to find some factual evidence,” stated Bill Binney, a former code-breaker on the National Security Agency.
Binney left the company in 2000 and has grow to be a self-styled whistleblower, making unsupported claims that the CIA is ambading and storing almost each U.S. communication. His badembly with Pompeo was first reported by The Intercept, an web information website.
Binney instructed NBC News that Pompeo knowledgeable him that the CIA director took the badembly on the urging of the president. The CIA had no instant remark.
In the previous, Pompeo has stated he accepts the U.S. intelligence evaluation, made with excessive confidence, that Russia sought to intrude within the 2016 presidential election, partially by hacking computer systems on the Democratic National Committee and leaking embarrbading paperwork.
Trump himself has not embraced that conclusion. And Pompeo, a former Army officer and Harvard Law School graduate who offers Trump his intelligence briefing almost each day, is clearly below strain over the problem.
Last month, the CIA needed to right Pompeo’s misguided badertion that the intelligence evaluation discovered that the Russian interference marketing campaign didn’t alter the result of the election. No such conclusion was made.
It is extraordinarily uncommon for a CIA director to fulfill with somebody like Binney, who for years has accused U.S. intelligence businesses of subverting the structure and violating the civil rights of Americans. He has been feted in Europe and elsewhere as a truth-telling whistleblower, however American officers of all political persuasions say his allegations in regards to the NSA are false.
Making the badembly much more noteworthy is the truth that Binney, 74, has made frequent appearances on RT, Russia’s state-funded broadcasting and web information company — which the CIA lately accused of performing as a propaganda arm for Russia, with the objective of undermining confidence in American democracy.
Binney has additionally been a frequent visitor on Fox News and has usually been cited by Breitbart News, two right-wing retailers to which Trump pays shut consideration.
Over the summer time, Binney co-authored a memo revealed by members of a bunch of former intelligence officers calling themselves Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). The memo argues that the DNC emails weren’t taken by Russian hackers, however had been as an alternative downloaded to a thumb drive, and due to this fact stolen by an insider.
The memo has since been disputed, even by some members of the group, together with Thomas Drake, one other NSA whistleblower.
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