Trump CIA Director Blames 'Worship of Edward Snowden' for Rise in Leaks

By Oliver Milman, Guardian UK

25 June 17

Mike Pompeo said more needed to be done to stem what he called an increase in the leaking of state secrets to ‘undermine the United States and democracy’

ike Pompeo, the director of the CIA, has blamed the “worship” of leakers such as Edward Snowden for a rise in the public disclosure of US intelligence.

Donald Trump’s pick to head the intelligence agency said more needed to be done to stem what he called an increase in the leaking of state secrets.

“In some ways, I do think [leaking has] accelerated,” Pompeo told MSNBC in an interview broadcast on Saturday. “I think there is a phenomenon, the worship of Edward Snowden, and those who steal American secrets for the purpose of self-aggrandizement or money or for whatever their motivation may be, does seem to be on the increase.”

Pompeo added: “It’s tough. You now have not only nation states trying to steal our stuff, but non-state, hostile intelligence services, well-funded – folks like WikiLeaks, out there trying to steal American secrets for the sole purpose of undermining the United States and democracy.”

Snowden is a former CIA employee who in 2013 revealed the extent of surveillance programs of ordinary citizens by the National Security Agency, leaking documents to media outlets including the Guardian. Snowden, who now lives in Moscow, has been hailed by some as a whistleblower who exposed a system that intruded on people’s private lives to a degree that blunted genuine national security efforts.

Pompeo, along with many other Republicans and some Democrats, has taken a dimmer view of the revelations. Last year, he called for Congress to “pass a law re-establishing collection of all metadata”.

In a National Review op ed published in December 2015, he wrote: “To share Edward Snowden’s vision of America as the problem is to come down on the side of President Obama’s diminishing willingness to collect intelligence on jihadis.”

WikiLeaks, meanwhile, has been a thorn in the side of the US government for some time. In 2010 Chelsea Manning, a former US army private who was recently released after being convicted by court marshal in 2013, gave Wikileaks more than 700,000 documents and diplomatic cables.

In March 2017, WikiLeaks revealed information on CIA activities, releasing nearly 8,000 documents that it said showed how the agency accesses computers. Speaking in April, Pompeo said: “It is time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is – a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia.”

During the 2016 election, WikiLeaks published Democratic party emails procured in a hack US intelligence agencies including the CIA believe was carried out by Russian actors seeking to help the Trump campaign.

Links between Trump aides and Moscow are now the focus of FBI and congressional investigations. The Trump White House has made attacks on those who leak confidential information a central plank of its response to those investigations.

In his MSNBC interview on Saturday, Pompeo predicted the Trump administration will have success in deterring leakers “as well as punishing those who we catch who have done it”.

The CIA director said Trump was an “avid consumer” of intelligence material. “Our goal is that he has the facts, the truth,” he said.

Pompeo said that while Islamic State remains an “enormous” threat to the US, he considered Iran a greater menace. He also identified North Korea as a “very real danger” and said Trump asks him about the communist dictatorship almost every day.