Donald Trump’s nominee to head the Central Intelligence Agency sided with intelligence officials who accuse Moscow of attempting to skew the US election on Thursday, as the rift between Trump and his spy chiefs intensified barely a week before the president-elect takes office.
Mike Pompeo’s comments to the Senate intelligence committee came amid an increasingly bitter row between Trump and the American spying agencies, which he has accused of leaking a dossier of salacious allegations against him.
Relations between the president-elect and the country’s 17 intelligence agencies reached a new low on Wednesday when he accused them of behaving like Nazis after the leak of the report which alleged that Moscow had personally compromising material on Trump.
As Trump’s ties with Russia continue to overshadow the build up to his inauguration:
- A senior member of the House intelligence committee called for a full congressional hearing to investigate Russian attempts to disrupt the US election.
- The justice department’s watchdog announced it would investigate the FBI’s handling of a probe into Hillary Clinton’s personal email server during her tenure as secretary of state – an issue that Democrats believe swung the election in Trump’s favour
- Republican senator Lindsay Graham rebuked Trump for questioning the competency of the intelligence agencies.
At confirmation hearings on Thursday, Pompeo and Trump’s nominee to head the Pentagon both sounded warnings over Russia’s growing global ambitions.
Pompeo stated unequivocally that he accepted the intelligence community’s conclusions that Moscow had sought to influence the election.
“It’s pretty clear about what took place here about Russia involvement in efforts to hack information and to have an impact on American democracy,” Pompeo said. “This was an aggressive action taken by the senior leaders inside Russia.”
The Kansas Republican congressman and former army officer was asked by Senator Angus King to comment on Trump’s alleged ties to Russia.
“I share your view that these are unsubstantiated media reports,” Pompeo said, but he pledged to investigate the allegations and “pursue the facts where ever they take us”.
In his Senate hearing, James Mattis, Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense, told the Senate armed services committee that Russia has “chosen to be a strategic competitor, an adversary in key areas”.
While Mattis said he was “all for engagement” with the Russians, he warned of “increasing number of areas in which we will have to confront Russia”.
Separately, Representative Eric Swalwell, the ranking member of the CIA Subcommittee of the House permanent select committee on intelligence, called for an independent bipartisan commission to investigate Russian attempts to disrupt the US election.
Writing for the Guardian, Representative Eric Swalwell said that the commission was needed “to set the record straight on what happened, and to recommend how best to protect ourselves from now on”.
Swalwell wrote: “The dire need for an independent commission is brought into even sharper focus by the president-elect’s ongoing and baseless accusations of bias against the 17 US intelligence agencies”.
Democratic politicians have voiced growing concern over the outbreak of open warfare between Trump and his intelligence chiefs barely a week before the president-elect takes office.
“It is really very damaging, in my view, to our standing in the world for a president to take one of the crown jewels of our national defense and denigrate it,” said outgoing vice-president Joe Biden on Thursday.
“It plays into, particularly now, the Russian narrative that America doesn’t know what it’s doing.”
Barely a week before Trump enters the White House, US intelligence chiefs have made it clear they are still investigating the material authored by a former British counter-intelligence official, Christopher Steele, originally as opposition research during the election campaign.
The director of national intelligence, James Clapper, issued a statement on Wednesday, saying he had talked to Trump that evening, expressing dismay about continuing leaks on the issue, and informing him that the US intelligence community “had not made any judgment that the information in this document is reliable, and we did not rely upon it in any way for our conclusions”.
“However, part of our obligation is to ensure that policymakers are provided with the fullest possible picture of any matters that might affect national security,” Clapper added.
By Thursday morning, Trump tweeted a distinctly different account of their conversation: “James Clapper called me yesterday to denounce the false and fictitious report that was illegally circulated. Made up, phony facts. Too bad!”
At his press conference on Wednesday, Trump simultaneously accepted and diminished the intelligence assessment that Russia was responsible for the Democratic National Committee hack, saying “I think it was Russia” and later adding the caveat: “You know what? It could be others also.” On Sunday, aide Reince Priebus insisted that Trump “is not denying that entities in Russia were behind this particular hacking campaign”.
The BBC has reported that there may be more compromising material about Trump in Russian hands that previously reported.
Correspondent Paul Wood said he had heard from serving CIA officers that there was “more than one tape”, “audio and video”, on “more than one date”, in “more than one place” – in the Ritz-Carlton in Moscow and also in St Petersburg – and that the material was “of a sexual nature”.
Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee and a consistent critic of spycraft excesses, told the Guardian it was “profoundly dangerous” for Trump to continue his feud with the agencies.
“The president is responsible for vital decisions about national security, including decisions about whether to go to war, which depend on the broad collection activities and reasoned analysis of the intelligence community. A scenario in which the president dismisses the intelligence community, or worse, accuses it of treachery, is profoundly dangerous,” Wyden said.
Vicki Divoll, a former attorney for the CIA and the Senate intelligence panel, saw little chance for a rapprochement between the intelligence agencies and Trump.
“After disparaging and demeaning the hardworking officers of the intelligence community, then grudgingly accepting their conclusions about Russian election hacking, Mr Trump is now hurling the worst epithet out there – comparisons to Nazi Germany – against them, without basis and on the eve of taking office,” Divoll said. “We are at our peril to be entering an era in which there is such open, irrational and hysterical hostility by a president against a community of 17 agencies whose mandate is to keep us safe.”
