Yesterday CIA Director Mike Pompeo gave a speech harshly attacking Wikileaks as a hostile non-state intelligence agency which frequently works with adversary spy services like Russia to attack America. It was an attack not only on Wikileaks but the entire information campaign carried on against the Democrats in 2016. In other words, it was an attack on Russian information warfare. There were none of President Trump’s professed doubts about who was behind the attacks, victim-blaming about the Democrats’ poor security and suggestions that the interference may somehow have been a good thing. The whole effort was somewhat belied by some quick online sleuthing which revealed that less than a year ago Pompeo gleefully tweeted out stolen emails published by Wikileaks. But that doesn’t change the aim of the speech or the larger campaign it seems to be a part of.
As I’ve noted in various posts in recent weeks, for all the Kusher/Bannon drama, the real evolution of the Trump White House is the rising dominance of a group of three and four star generals – especially Defense Secretary of Mattis and perhaps even more National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster – who I believe have an increasingly dominant role in policy formation, certainly on everything tied to national security and foreign affairs. Pompeo, though certainly not a senior general and actually a pretty intense partisan, nonetheless seems part of the effort to put the traditional national security apparatus in charge of policy. That in many ways was the point of that Pompeo speech yesterday....
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/trumps-generals-and-the-russia-story
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