Trump to visit CIA HQ after bitter split with spies

Trump to visit CIA HQ after bitter split with spies

NEWS: goo.gl/a3kAcQ



Donald Trump told a room full of Central Intelligence Agency employees on Saturday that they will play an integral role in ridding the world of the ISIS terror army, and that he will give them a longer leash to get the job done.

The approving encouragement came at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, as Trump made the first official stop of his first full day as America's president.

And he insisted that 'dishonest' reporters had overplayed reports that he was feuding with the U.S. Intelligence Community over allegations that Russian hacking aided his November election win.





'We've been fighting these wars for longer than any wars we've ever fought,' Trump said, apparently in reference to the global war on jihadi extremists that has surpassed officially 'declared' wars in length and cost.



'We have not used the real abilities that we have. We've been restrained,' he lamented, hinting that American spies and counterterrorism agents could soon find once-banned tradecraft methods available to them again.

'We have to get rid of ISIS. We have to get rid of ISIS,' Trump said. 'We have no choice.'

'Radical Islamic terrorism, and I said it yesterday, has to be eradicated. Just off the face of the earth. This is evil. This is evil.'

Trump told a capacity crowd of 400 that unlike 'wars between countries' whose genesis can be easily understood, the depths of Islamist rage at the root of the ISIS terror campaign 'is something nobody can even understand. This is a level of evil that we haven't seen.



Standing in front of a wall memorializing the deaths of necessarily nameless CIA officers, the new president declared: 'You're going to go to it, and you're going to do a phenomenal job. But we're going to end it. It's time. It's time right now to end it.'

Trump called the CIA 'one of the most important groups in this country' for maintaining national security and solving problems that are 'interrelated' with 'the kind of havoc and fear that this sick group of people has caused.'

Trump shrugged off the idea that he needed reconciliation with the nation's intelligence services following an election year in which the CIA, NSA and FBI concluded that Russia's government aided him through malicious computer hacking.

The president himself suggested intelligence analysts and operatives may have improperly leaked false information that erroneously linked him with the Russian regime, including claims participating in perverted sex practices while in Russia gave the Kremlin a tool to control him.

Trump has specifically suggested that former president Barack Obama's CIA Director John Brennan may have personally fed the document to journalists.



He walked that accusation back in an interview that aired Wednesday on the Fox News Channel.

On Saturday a receptive audience gave him a warm welcome, opening up room for a chummy declaration of common purpose.

'I am with you 1,000 per cent,' Trump said, declaring that 'a running war with the media' led him to choose Langley as his first stop on his first full day at the White House.

'They are among the most dishonest human beings on earth,' Trump said of journalists. 'And they sort of made it sound like I had a feud with the Intelligence Community.'

'And I just want to let you know, the reason you're [my] number one stop – it is exactly the opposite. Exactly. And they understand that too.'

The president's team initially planned to visit Langley to swear in Kansas congressman Mike Pompeo as the agency's director following Senate confirmation on Friday.

But three liberal senators – Ron Wyden of Oregon, Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut – put up a brief fight to postpone the vote, a proceeding which requires at least a few Democrats to consent first.



Pompeo could be confirmed by Monday, but there are no guarantees Trump will have his intelligence team in place on any particular day next week.

Trump told the CIA employees that Pompeo was the first of as many as nine interviews he had scheduled with potential spy chiefs, and he never got to the second one.

'That was the only guy I wanted to meet,' he recalled.

'I said 'cancel everybody else'.'

Trump said Pompeo would be 'a gem' and 'a total star' at the helm of the CIA.

'He was number one at West Point. Ad he was also essentially number one at Harvard law School, and then he decided to go into the military. And he ran for Congress. And everything he's done has been a home run,' he said of the Kansan.

'And people like him, but much more important to me, everybody respects him.'

The president drew warm laughter from a section of the room filled with rank-and-file employees, by boasting that his own intellectual firepower gave him the ability to evaluate Pompeo's talent and aptitude.

'They say, 'Is Donald Trump an intellectual?'' he boomed.

'Trust me. I'm like a smart person. And I recognized immediately.'