Tag: Mike Pompeo

State Department bars press corps from Pompeo briefing, won’t release list of attendees

The State Department on Monday said it would not be distributing a transcript or list of attendees from a briefing call with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo held that evening — a call from which the department’s press corps was excluded and only “faith-based media” allowed.

The afternoon phone briefing was to discuss “international religious freedom” with the secretary — who rarely participates in such calls — ahead of his trip to the Middle East. One member of the State Department press corps was invited, only to be un-invited after RSVPing. That reporter was told that the call was for “faith-based media only.”

CNN also RSVP’d to organizers, asking to be included, but received no reply.Despite repeated inquires and complaints from members of the press corps who are based at the department, the State Department on Monday night said they would not be providing a transcript of the call, a list of faith-based media outlets who were allowed to participate or the criteria to be invited.

Officials would not answer questions about whether a range of faiths was included.A reporter with EWTN Global Catholic Television told CNN they were not originally invited to take part in Monday’s call with Pompeo but had asked the State Department if they could take part. The reporter was then invited to a different call involving faith-based organizations and Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback that took place Tuesday and was organized by an outside group.

An article from Religion News Service — which notes that it “is not a faith-based media organization, but rather a secular news service that covers religion, spirituality and ethics” — said participants in the Pompeo briefing “were not told that the call was limited to faith-based media.””While it was not clear which outlets were part of the call, questions were asked by Religion News Service, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Algemeiner, World Magazine and The Leaven, the newspaper of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas. America Magazine also participated in the call,” according to RNS.On Tuesday evening, one of the participants shared a transcript of the call with the press corps. That transcript showed that Pompeo faced questions about the Israeli election, terrorism and the omission of the word “occupied” when describing the Golan Heights and the West Bank.Pompeo did take part in an on-the-record briefing with the traveling press en route to the Middle East, where he was asked similar questions and provided similar responses.The State Department told the press traveling with Pompeo that the department does not release transcripts for print roundtables. However, they typically release transcripts for all of the secretary’s public press engagements. Former State Department spokesperson John Kirby, who is a CNN Global Affairs analyst, said “it is typical practice that any on the record interview in which a Cabinet official participates is transcribed and published at the earliest appropriate opportunity.””These officials are public servants. What they say — in its entirety — is inherently of public interest. It’s inappropriate and irresponsible not to observe that obligation,” he told CNN.Kirby said he has “certainly seen times when particular journalists or columnists have been targeted for inclusion on given topics.” However, “to exclude beat reporters from something as universally relevant as religious freedom in the Middle East strikes me as not only self-defeating but incredibly small-minded,” he said. “It’s perfectly fine to ensure faith-based media have a seat at such a table. But it’s PR malpractice to cut off access to the broader press corps. I wish I could say I expected more from this crowd,” Kirby said.A State Department spokesperson said in a statement that some press engagements — “Department press briefings, teleconferences on a myriad of policy issues, briefings and sprays by the Secretary of State and other officials— are open to any interested domestic or international press.”

[CNN]

State Dept. Cancels Journalist’s Award Over Her Criticism of Trump

Jessikka Aro, a Finnish investigative journalist, has faced down death threats and harassment over her work exposing Russia’s propaganda machine long before the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. In January, the U.S. State Department took notice, telling Aro she would be honored with the prestigious International Women of Courage Award, to be presented in Washington by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Weeks later, the State Department rescinded the award offer. A State Department spokesperson said it was due to a “regrettable error,” but Aro and U.S. officials familiar with the internal deliberations tell a different story. They say the department revoked her award after U.S. officials went through Aro’s social media posts and found she had also frequently criticized President Donald Trump.

“It created a shitstorm of getting her unceremoniously kicked off the list,” said one U.S. diplomatic source familiar with the internal deliberations. “I think it was absolutely the wrong decision on so many levels,” the source said. The decision “had nothing to do with her work.”

The State Department spokesperson said in an email that Aro was “incorrectly notified” that she had been chosen for the award and that it was a mistake that resulted from “a lack of coordination in communications with candidates and our embassies.”

“We regret this error. We admire Ms. Aro’s achievements as a journalist, which were the basis of U.S. Embassy Helsinki’s nomination,” the spokesperson said. 

Aro received a formal invitation to the award ceremony not from the embassy but from the State Department’s Office of the Chief of Protocol on Feb. 12. 

There is no indication that the decision to revoke the award came from the secretary of state or the White House. Officials who spoke to FP have suggested the decision came from lower-level State Department officials wary of the optics of Pompeo granting an award to an outspoken critic of the Trump administration. The department spokesperson did not respond to questions on who made the decision or why. 

To U.S. officials who spoke to FP, the incident underscores how skittish some officials—career and political alike—have become over government dealings with vocal critics of a notoriously thin-skinned president. The Trump administration has barred the hiring of prominent Republican foreign-policy experts who publicly denounced the president during the 2016 election season, including some who have since walked back their criticisms. As another example, Trump himself last year revoked the security clearance of former CIA Director John Brennan, who regularly castigates the president on Twitter, and threatened to follow suit with other former national security officials who did the same. 

In the minds of some diplomats, this has created an atmosphere where lower-level officials self-censor dealings with critics of the administration abroad, even without senior officials weighing in.

Aro said the decision to cancel her award and corresponding trip to the United States caught her completely by surprise.

“[When] I was informed about the withdrawal out of the blue, I felt appalled and shocked,” Aro told FP. “The reality in which political decisions or presidential pettiness directs top U.S. diplomats’ choices over whose human rights work is mentioned in the public sphere and whose is not is a really scary reality.”

Aro is a prolific Twitter user and was originally chosen for the award because of her investigative work exposing Russian troll factories. She often debunks misinformation spread online and comments on major news events related to propaganda and election interference, including Brexit and the ongoing investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller into links between the Russian government and Trump’s campaign. She has regularly tweeted criticism about Trump’s sharp political rhetoric and attacks on the press. Aro also helped organize a demonstration in Helsinki when the Finnish capital hosted a summit between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in July 2018.

“I use Twitter to exchange ideas and share information freely,” Aro said. “I find the idea of U.S. government officials stalking my Twitter and politicizing my perfectly normal expressions of opinion deeply disturbing.”

After first being notified she would get the award, Aro filled out forms and questionnaires at the request of officials and cancelled paid speaking engagements to travel to Washington to attend the March 7 ceremony in Washington. The State Department also sent her an official invitation to accept the award and planned an itinerary for a corresponding tour of the United States, complete with flights and high-profile visits to newspapers and universities across the country.

Since 2007, the State Department has held an annual award ceremony honoring women around the world who “have demonstrated exceptional courage and leadership in advocating for peace, justice, human rights, gender equality, and women’s empowerment, often at great personal risk and sacrifice,” according to the department’s website.

This year, the award is being given to Razia Sultana of Bangladesh; Naw K’nyaw Paw of Myanmar; Moumina Houssein Darar of Djibouti; Magda Gobran-Gorgi (“Mama Maggie”) of Egypt; Col. Khalida Khalaf Hanna al-Twal of Jordan; Sister Orla Treacy of Ireland; Olivera Lakic of Montenegro; Flor de Maria Vega Zapata of Peru; Marini de Livera of Sri Lanka; and Anna Aloys Henga of Tanzania.

The awards “demonstrate the United States commitment to gender equality, social inclusion, and advancing the global status of women and girls from all backgrounds across sectors as part of our foreign policy,” State Department deputy spokesman Robert Palladino said in a press briefing on Tuesday.

Pompeo will host the ceremony honoring the awardees on Thursday morning. First lady Melania Trump is also expected to attend and speak at the ceremony.

In 2014, Aro pursued reporting on a Russian troll factory in St. Petersburg that aimed to alter western public opinions. Long before the U.S. elections in 2016, which propelled Russian disinformation campaigns to the spotlight, she unearthed evidence of a state-sanctioned propaganda machine trying to shape online discourse and spread disinformation. After she published her investigation, Russian nationalist websites and pro-Moscow outlets in Finland coordinated smear campaigns against her, accusing her at times of being a Western intelligence agent and drug dealer, and bombarding her with anonymous abusive messages. She also received death threats.

Aro won the Finnish Grand Prize for Journalism in 2016 for her investigative work, and in 2018, she successfully sued the founder of MV-Lehti, a far-right, pro-Russian website in Finland, for defamation and negligence after it published offensive content about her following her initial investigation.

In late February, Aro submitted a letter drafted by her lawyer to the U.S. Embassy in Helsinki asking for justification about why her award was rescinded at the last minute and who made the decision. The letter also reserved the right to seek damages, due to Aro having to cancel paid speaking events that would have conflicted with Thursday’s award ceremony.

Aro said the embassy has not yet responded to the letter.

[Foreign Policy]

Trump Bemoans ‘Persecuted White Farmers’ in South Africa

President Trump says he has instructed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to look into alleged violence against white farmers in South Africa and the government’s alleged seizure of their land after watching a Fox News report on the subject. Citing Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s statement that the “South African government is now seizing land from white farmers,” Trump tweeted that he’s asked Pompeo to “closely study” the matter, which he said involves the “large scale killing of farmers.” The comments, which appear to fuel claims by right-wing groups that the South African government is waging war against whites, seemed to be an abrupt change of subject from perhaps the biggest blow to Trump’s White House so far: the conviction of his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and the plea deal by his longtime fixer Michael Cohen earlier this week. The State Department has yet to comment on Trump’s tweet, but in a statement cited in the same Fox News report Trump was referencing, the State Department noted that South Africa’s land redistributions are being carried out through “an open process including public hearings, broad-based consultations, and active civic society engagement.” Most of South Africa’s land belongs to a white minority two decades after apartheid ended.

[The Daily Beast]

Reality

How does a specific white genocide conspiracy theory about white farmers being murdered in South Africa pushed by the white supremacist groups AfriForum and Identity Evropa, where the white supremacist podcasts White Rabbit Radio and Jared Taylor’s American Renaissance both had episodes dedicated to, end up being tweeted out by Donald Trump?

Oh he watched it on white supremacist Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show.

The reality is, as with the vast majority of conspiracy theories, it is simply not true.

Yes there are farmers being murdered in South Africa and each one is sad and tragic, but since Trump is talking about the data then we have to look at the data. Murder rates among African farmers have drastically declined over the past decades and there are no stats that say they happened for racial reasons.

The last time there was large scale tracking in South Africa of murders of farmers by race, 33% of victims were black.

Also, South Africa’s has a high murder rate, of 34.1 per 100,000 people, that number is far lower in the rural areas.

 

US leaving UN Human Rights Council — ‘a cesspool of political bias’

US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley announced the United States is withdrawing from the UN Human Rights Council Tuesday, accusing the body of bias against US ally Israel and a failure to hold human rights abusers accountable.

The move, which the Trump administration has threatened for months, came down one day after the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights slammed the separation of children from their parents at the US-Mexico border as “unconscionable.”
Speaking from the State Department, where she was joined by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Haley defended the move to withdraw from the council, saying US calls for reform were not heeded.
“Human rights abusers continue to serve on, and be elected to, the council,” said Haley, listing US grievances with the body. “The world’s most inhumane regimes continue to escape its scrutiny, and the council continues politicizing scapegoating of countries with positive human rights records in an attempt to distract from the abusers in its ranks.”

‘Deeply disappointed’

“For too long,” Haley said, “the Human Rights Council has been a protector of human rights abusers, and a cesspool of political bias.”
Based in Geneva, the Human Rights Council is a body of 47 member states within the United Nations tasked with upholding human rights.
Membership on the council gives countries like the United States a voice in important debates over human rights atrocities, but the council’s critics, including Haley, say abusers use their membership to guarantee their own impunity.
Vice President Mike Pence tweeted a statement: “Today the U.S. took a stand against some of the world’s worst human rights violators by withdrawing from the United Nations Human Rights Council. By elevating and protecting human rights violators and engaging in smear campaigns against democratic nations, the UNHRC makes a mockery of itself, its members, and the mission it was founded on. For years, the UNHRC has engaged in ever more virulent anti-American, and anti-Israel invective and the days of U.S. participation are over.”
The UN expressed disappointment. “The Secretary-General would have much preferred for the United States to remain in the Human Rights Council,” Stéphane Dujarric, the spokesman for UN Secretary-General António Guterres, said in response to the US announcement. “The UN’s Human Rights architecture plays a very important role in the promotion and protection of human rights worldwide.”
The move was immediately condemned by a dozen charitable groups, who wrote to Pompeo to say they were “deeply disappointed with the Administration’s decision to withdraw the United States from the United Nations Human Rights Council, the premier intergovernmental human rights body at the global level.”

‘A so-called Human Rights Council’

“This decision is counterproductive to American national security and foreign policy interests and will make it more difficult to advance human rights priorities and aid victims of abuse around the world,” they added.
Salil Shetty, Amnesty International’s secretary-general, said: “Once again President Trump is showing his complete disregard for the fundamental rights and freedoms the US claims to uphold. While the Human Rights Council is by no means perfect and its membership is frequently under scrutiny, it remains an important force for accountability and justice.”
US withdrawal from the council follows efforts by Haley and the US delegation to implement reforms, including more stringent membership criteria and the ability to remove members with egregious human rights records.
“When a so-called Human Rights Council cannot bring itself to address the massive abuses in Venezuela and Iran, and it welcomes the Democratic Republic of Congo as a new member, the council ceases to be worthy of its name,” said Haley. “Such a council, in fact, damages the cause of human rights.”
Haley also blasted the council for a “disproportionate focus and unending hostility toward Israel,” citing a series of resolutions highlighting alleged abuses by the Israeli government of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
Haley said the United States will continue to promote human rights outside of the council and would consider rejoining it in the future if reforms are made.
“We have used America’s voice and vote to defend human rights at the UN every day,” she said, “and we will continue to do so.”

[CNN]

‘Insulting and ridiculous and ludicrous!’ Mike Pompeo blows up at reporter for asking basic question on Korea

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Wednesday exploded at an unidentified reporter who asked him a very basic question about verifying the destruction of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal.

Via Congressional Quarterly foreign policy reporter Rachel Oswald, a reporter questioning Pompeo about talks with North Korea asked him how he could make sure the country had committed to allowing inspectors in to verify denuclearization when there was nothing about verifying disarmament in the joint statement signed by both countries.

“I find that question insulting and ridiculous and, frankly, ludicrous,” Pompeo angrily responded. “I just have to be honest with you. It’s a game and one ought not play games with serious matters like this.”

The Trump administration has insisted that it wants North Korea to commit to the “complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization” of the Korean Peninsula. However, in the joint statement signed by the U.S. and North Korea, it only says that the country is committed to “working toward complete denuclearization.”

This distinction is important because it would give North Korea a loophole to argue that it does not need to allow inspectors into its facilities. What’s more, it could give North Korea the right to rebuild its nuclear weapons program even if it did actually go through with dismantling it.

[Raw Story]

Sarah Huckabee Sanders: Democrats Voting Against Pompeo Don’t ‘Love’ America

As the Senate Foreign Relations Committee prepares to vote on President Donald Trump’s secretary of state nominee Mike Pompeo, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders appeared on Fox & Friends Monday morning and accused anyone planning to vote against him of being unpatriotic.

“Look, at some point, Democrats have to decide whether they love this country more than they hate this president,” Sanders said on Fox News. “And they have to decide that they want to put the safety and the security and the diplomacy of our country ahead of their own political games. And we’re very hopeful that they will.”

Sanders cited the fact that Pompeo was “top of his class” at Harvard and “first in his class” at Westpoint, but those credentials have little to do with the opposition to Pompeo from every Democratic member of the committee in addition to Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY).

During his confirmations hearings earlier this month, Pompeo was forced to defend his hawkish positions on Iran and Russia and refused to apologize for Islamophobic comments he had made in the past. “My record is exquisite with respect to treating each and every faith with the dignity that they deserved,” the current CIA director insisted.

Last fall, Pompeo delivered false and misleading statements about the intelligence community’s findings on Russian interference in the 2016 election. While Pompeo said at a security conference, “The intelligence community’s assessment is that the Russian meddling that took place did not affect the outcome of the election,” the official report directly stated, “We did not make an assessment of the impact that Russian activities had on the outcome of the 2016 election.”

“Hard to believe Obstructionists May vote against Mike Pompeo for Secretary of State,” President Trump tweeted on Monday, shortly after his press secretary’s appearance on Fox & Friends. “The Dems will not approve hundreds of good people, including the Ambassador to Germany. They are maxing out the time on approval process for all, never happened before. Need more Republicans!”

[Daily Beast]

Media

Trump fires Rex Tillerson, selects Mike Pompeo as new Secretary of State

President Donald Trump asked Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to step aside, the White House confirmed Tuesday, replacing him with CIA Director Mike Pompeo.

In a tweet, Trump thanked Tillerson for his service and said Pompeo “will do a fantastic job.”

The ouster ends months of discord between Trump and Tillerson, who often seemed out of the loop or in disagreement with the president on major foreign policy decisions. The president also named Gina Haspel as the new head of the CIA, pending the confirmation process. Those hearings are expected to dredge up debates about controversial interrogation tactics, like waterboarding, that might make her path to permanence a rocky one.

The exit was not a voluntary one, the State Department confirmed in a startling statement Tuesday. Tillerson “did not speak to the President and is unaware of the reason” for his firing, Under Secretary of State Steve Goldstein said in a statement Tuesday morning, “but he is grateful for the opportunity to serve.”

Hours after Goldstein’s statement contradicting the White House’s account on Tillerson, a senior State Department official confirmed to NBC News that he had also been fired.

NBC News learned Tuesday from sources familiar with the situation that Chief of Staff John Kelly spoke with Tillerson by phone on Friday and told him that Trump intended to ask him to “step aside.” In that call — which came while Tillerson was traveling through Africa — Kelly did not specify when that change might come. Kelly also called Tillerson again on Saturday, a senior White House official said, expressing once again the president’s “imminent” intention to replace his secretary of state.

The Associated Press, citing senior State Department officials, reported Tuesday that Tillerson had been even more blindsided, saying that Kelly had warned him on that Friday call that there might be a tweet from the president coming that would concern him, but did not detail what the tweet might say or when it would post.

A senior State Department official told NBC that Tillerson officially found out that he had been fired when Trump tweeted the news that he’d been replaced.

Tillerson, said Goldstein, had “every intention of staying because of the critical progress made in national security.”

[NBC News]

Reality

Trump regularly fires people who do not display total loyalty to him and Tillerson did not.

Tillerson once called Trump a “moron” disagreed with him on Putin, the Paris Climate Agreement, Iran Nuclear Deal, North Korea, moving the Jerusalem embassy, etc…

Trump made CIA director meet with Fox guest peddling ‘inside job’ conspiracy on DNC hack

A frequent Fox News guest who has been peddling a conspiracy theory that the hack of the Democratic National Committee in 2016 was an “inside job” says he recently met with CIA Director Mike Pompeo at the urging of President Donald Trump.

In an interview with The Intercept, former National Security Agency intelligence officer William Binney says he met with Pompeo last month to discuss his theory that an internal staff member stole emails from the DNC and sent them all to WikiLeaks. He says Pompeo told them that Trump had recommended the two men talk.

The theory that the 2016 DNC hack was an “inside job” is totally at odds with U.S. intelligence agencies’ assessments that Russian intelligence operatives were behind the attack. An exhaustive Associated Press report from last week revealed that Russian hackers had targeted the DNC as far back as October 2015 by sending out a flurry of malicious phishing emails that they used to gain access to both the DNC emails and former Clinton campaign manager John Podesta’s personal email account.

Despite this, Binney is insistent that the DNC hack was done by a DNC insider — and he tells The Intercept that he even brought up the Seth Rich murder conspiracy theory in his meeting with Pompeo.

“It is particularly stunning that Pompeo would meet with Binney at Trump’s apparent urging, in what could be seen as an effort to discredit the U.S. intelligence community’s own assessment that an alleged Russian hack of the DNC servers was part of an effort to help Trump win the presidency,” writes The Intercept, which further notes that Trump could have first learned of Binney during his appearances on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News program this past August.

“I was willing to meet Pompeo simply because it was clear to me the intelligence community wasn’t being honest here,” Binney tells The Intercept. “I am quite willing to help people who need the truth to find the truth and not simply have deceptive statements from the intelligence community.”

[Raw Story]

CIA director rebuked for false claim on Kremlin’s election meddling

CIA Director Mike Pompeo drew sharp criticism Thursday after wrongly stating that the U.S. intelligence community had found that Russian meddling did not tilt the 2016 presidential election.

Pompeo made the inaccurate claim at an event hosted by the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a conservative think tank close to the Trump administration. His comments come amid growing evidence of Russian interference in last year’s campaign, the scale of which remains unclear.

“The intelligence community’s assessment is that the Russian meddling that took place did not affect the outcome of the election,” Pompeo said.

The intelligence community has made no such assessment. A report by the CIA and the National Security Agency released in January found that the Kremlin hacked emails and disseminated propaganda in order “to help [then-candidate Donald Trump’s] election chances.”

But the report’s authors explained that they “did not make an assessment of the impact that Russian activities had on the outcome of the 2016 election.”

“I warned in January that Director Pompeo’s views on Russia shifted with those of the president,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, wrote on Twitter. “Today is more evidence of that sad fact.”

President Donald Trump, who has doubted whether Russia interfered in the election at all, has repeatedly made the blanket assertion that any Kremlin meddling had no ultimate impact. “The Russians did not affect the vote,” Trump told NBC in May.

“Not true,” former CIA Deputy Director David Cohen tweeted after Pompeo’s remark Thursday. “The Intelligence Community Assessment specifically said the IC made no judgment on whether Russian interference affected election.”

And Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) posted on Twitter that Pompeo was either “parroting POTUS talking points” or “making major split from rest of the IC on Russia meddling.”

A CIA official insisted that neither was true.

“The intelligence assessment with regard to Russian election meddling has not changed, and the director did not intend to suggest that it had,” CIA spokesman Ryan Trapani told POLITICO.

Pompeo could have meant only that Russia did not manipulate the final vote count. The January intelligence report, citing the Department of Homeland Security, said that while Russia hacked into several state and local election databases, those systems were “not involved in vote tallying.”

But many Democrats, including Trump’s defeated 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton, strongly reject the wider claim that a scheme by Russian President Vladimir Putin could not have influenced voter attitudes enough to swing the election.

“Because no evidence has emerged yet of direct vote tampering, some critics insist that Russian interference had no impact on the outcome at all. This is absurd,” Clinton wrote in her recent memoir about the election, “What Happened.”

“The Kremlin’s information warfare was roughly equivalent to a hostile Super PAC unleashing a major ad campaign if not worse. Of course it had an impact,” she added.

Emails from the Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party that were hacked and made public by Russian operatives dominated media coverage for months. And growing evidence of sophisticated Russian propaganda on Twitter and Facebook is fueling Democratic beliefs that the Kremlin might have tipped narrowly decided states like Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania in Trump’s favor.

Last month, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told CNN the intelligence community assessed that Russian interference “cast doubt on the legitimacy of [Trump’s] victory in the election.” Pompeo made his Thursday statement in response to a question about Clapper’s comment.

The January intelligence report did not even try to reach a formal conclusion about the impact of Russian interference, noting that the US intelligence community “does not analyze U.S. political processes or U.S. public opinion.”

Pompeo has been criticized before for what he has said about Russia’s role in the election. During a July appearance at the Aspen Security Forum, he seemed to downplay the Kremlin’s 2016 election interference, calling it nothing new.

“It is true” that Russia intervened in the last election, Pompeo said. “And the one before that, and the one before that. They have been at this a hell of a long time.”

Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said, “This is not the first time the director has made statements minimizing the significance of what the Russians did, but it needs to be the last.”

During his January confirmation hearing, held shortly after the intelligence community report, Pompeo stressed the importance of the official findings.

“It’s pretty clear what took place here,” Pompeo told the Senate Intelligence Committee. “I’m very clear-eyed about what that intelligence report says.”

“My obligation as director of the CIA,” he added, “is to tell every policymaker the facts as best the intelligence agency has developed them.”

[Politico]

Intel Officials Fret Trump Doesn’t Understand Info Given to Him During 30-Minute Security Briefings

It’s now well-known that President Donald Trump allegedly revealed classified information to Russian officials during an unorthodox Oval Office meeting a few weeks ago. The underlying message behind that story, according to a new Washington Post report, is about how the president consumes the intelligence that comes across his desk.

According to the Post, Trump’s intelligence briefings “often run past their scheduled time, stretching for 30 or 45 minutes, prompting Trump’s chief of staff, Reince Priebus, to pop into the Oval Office to cut off the discussion: ‘Mr. President, we’ve got people backing up outside.’”

It’s not just the length, but also the content of the Trump’s briefings that appear to be cause for concern. Prior reports reveal that the president prefers the use of “visual aides” like infographics and photos in his briefings, and this latest Post report reinforces that.

“As they huddle around the desk, Trump likes to pore over visuals — maps, charts, pictures and videos, as well as “killer graphics,” as CIA Director Mike Pompeo phrased it,” Post reporters Philip Rucker and Ashley Parker wrote. This tendency towards visuals is, according to their sources, due to Trump’s career in real estate that required him to regularly view blueprints.

Despite efforts by White House staff to make intelligence more legible for the president, “there are signs that the president may not be retaining all the intelligence he is presented, fully absorbing its nuance, or respecting the sensitivities of the information and how it was gathered,” Parker and Rucker wrote.

The president’s seeming mishandling of the classified intelligence he gave to the Russians, according to the Post, provides an uneasy “portrait of Trump as a consumer of the nation’s secrets”.

During his presidential transition, Trump infamously said he only needed weekly briefings, and reports from the transition noted that he would often refuse briefings presented to him.

“Pompeo and [Director of National Intelligence Dan] Coats are doing their best to give him the most accurate daily briefing, but my sense is in the rank-and-file, they are very worried about how do you deal with him and about sharing with him sensitive material,” former Assistant CIA Director Mark Lowenthal told the Post. “This is the result of his behavior.”

[Raw Story]

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