CIA Chief Has Vicious Words for WikiLeaks and Assange

'It ends now,' he warns organization
By Rob Quinn,  Newser Staff
Posted Apr 14, 2017 7:40 AM CDT
CIA Chief Blasts WikiLeaks as a 'Hostile Intelligence Service'
CIA Director Mike Pompeo speaks at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, Thursday, April 13, 2017.   (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

"It's time to call out WikiLeaks for what it is—a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia," CIA chief Mike Pompeo said Thursday, pulling no punches as he laid into the organization that President Trump declared his love for on the campaign trail. Julian Assange and "his ilk make common cause with dictators today," Pompeo said, per Politico, accusing the WikiLeaks founder of cloaking himself in the language of liberty and privacy while really caring only about his own celebrity. "Their currency is clickbait; their moral compass, nonexistent," Pompeo said, adding that he was confident "that had Assange been around in the 1930s and '40s and '50s, he would have found himself on the wrong side of history."

Pompeo, a former GOP congressman from Kansas, called Assange a narcissist, a fraud, and a "coward hiding behind a screen," the Wichita Eagle reports. "And in Kansas, we know something about false wizards," he said. Pompeo strongly suggested that the Trump administration, which has apparently sharply shifted position on WikiLeaks, is about to take firm action against WikiLeaks. "It ends now," warned the CIA chief, who said his agency has a "fantastic relationship" with Trump. WikiLeaks fired back with more than a dozen tweets, including one with a screenshot of a tweet Pompeo made last summer saying that DNC emails, leaked courtesy of WikiLeaks, were proof that the election "fix was in" from "Obama on down." (More WikiLeaks stories.)

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