Trump Is Using the CIA to Investigate Conspiracy Theories

By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Facebook Page

09 November 17

t is an abuse of power for a president to tell the CIA to investigate someone or something. But last month Trump told CIA Director Mike Pompeo to meet with William Binney, a former U.S. intelligence official who has been pushing, on Fox News, a bizarre right-wing conspiracy theory that the theft of the Democratic National Committee’s emails during the 2016 presidential campaign was an inside job at the DNC, rather than a hack by Russian intelligence, as the intelligence community has concluded. Binney’s claim has helped fuel the theory that the murder of a young DNC staffer Seth Rich last year was somehow connected to the data theft.

As Trump requested, Pompeo then met with Binney. Binney says he mentioned the case of Seth Rich to Pompeo during their meeting.

So a conspiracy theory that favors Trump is aired on Fox News, and then Trump orders his CIA director to pursue it. This is not how the system is supposed to work, friends.

But it’s looking more and more like the head of the CIA is a stooge of Trump. In August, Pompeo took the unusual step of having the CIA’s Counterintelligence Mission Center, which would likely play a role in any inquiries by the agency into Russian election meddling, report directly to him. Then in October, Pompeo said that U.S. intelligence had determined that Moscow’s intervention had not affected the outcome of the election, causing the CIA to issue a clarification saying that the intelligence assessment on Russia had not been altered.

Trump doesn’t understand that a president must respect the independence and integrity of the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, and the Justice Department. Otherwise, we have a banana republic.

What do you think?