Did Pompeo Also Get an Obstruction Call from Trump?

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The WaPo reports that Trump called both Admiral Mike Rogers and Dan Coats to ask if they could issue statements denying any collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russia.

Trump made separate appeals to the director of national intelligence, Daniel Coats, and to Adm. Michael S. Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency, urging them to publicly deny the existence of any evidence of collusion during the 2016 election.

Coats and Rogers refused to comply with the requests, which they both deemed to be inappropriate, according to two current and two former officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private communications with the president.

If Trump was calling spooks, he presumably would have called all spooks, including CIA Director Mike Pompeo (with whom he is probably closer than the other two). So why aren’t we hearing about that call? Is Pompeo just better at keeping secrets than his counterparts? Or is he hiding it because he didn’t object as strongly as his counterparts?

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14 replies
  2. Peterr says:

    I’m not altogether certain Trump would have called Pompeo. On the surface, as you state, it would make sense to think so, but Trump and Pompeo were already butting heads in February, over the allegations that the CIA and others in the IC were withholding sensitive information from the WH out of fear of how they handle things. Pompeo told Trump it wasn’t true, but that wasn’t good enough for Trump. From CBS on Feb 17th:

    CBS News has learned that on Thursday, an angry President Trump called CIA Director Mike Pompeo and yelled at him for not pushing back hard enough against reports that the intelligence community was withholding information from the commander-in-chief.

    The agency then drafted a strongly worded statement rebutting the claim. “We are not aware of any instance when that has occurred,” read Pompeo’s statement. “It is CIA’s mission to provide the President with the best intelligence possible and to explain the basis for that intelligence. The CIA does not, has not, and will never hide intelligence from the President, period.”

    The White House also denied the report. The president “did not yell at the CIA director,” a White House spokesperson wrote Saturday in an email to CBS News.

    If this was the state of affairs between the WH and CIA in February, I can easily imagine Trump NOT calling Pompeo in March to get pushback against the collusion accusation. He clearly didn’t trust Pompeo’s minions at Langley, and that likely spilled over into his trust of Pompeo.

     

  7. Evangelista says:

    Marcy,

    I would advise to not engage in serious discussion of anything published as information in the Washington Post.  I would suggest to not take seriously anything provide as information by the Washington Post.  The percentage of hysteria and hyperventilation, and consequently provision of propaganda, pure nonsense and garbage by the Washington Post devalues all of its content to below Tabloid status (Tabloids being superior for not attempting to pass their gossip and innuendo as “objective journalism”).

    The old saying of “garbage in, garbage out” applies to hysteria, hyperventilation and slanted, biased and propaganda-purposed “news”.

    Discussing garbage news seriously you will find yourself discussing fabrications as if the false in them was real, making exaggerations foundations and building intellectual fabrication on gossip, rumor and disinformation that are, in turn, more disinformation.

     

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    • GKJames says:

      Right. But what, specifically, in the Washington Post article amounts to “hysteria and hyperventilation”?

    • SpaceLifeform says:

      So, who do you recommend?

      Is Pravda ok? How about rt.ru?

      Why should anyone believe any media outlet?

      Why are you dissing WaPo?

      You will not answer. You are trying to spread FUD.

  8. LeMoyne says:

    I wrote a long reply that was tl; dr…  In short, Pompeo took the first offer: he took the loyalty oath.  Pompeo is like Trump in acting out beyond all bounds and respecting neither check nor balance.  He will not rat out Trump. Instead he seeks a First Amendment carve-out for ‘hostile non-state intelligence services’, i.e. publishers of effective whistleblowers like Wikileaks.

    In a word: omerta.

  9. Evangelista says:

    SpaceLifeform,
    1. I can’t answer you because the ‘reply’ feature here does not work.
    2. No media outlet should be religiously believed. All reportage content should be reviewed for reason, rationality and logical continuity, and against existing known information (for fit of each to the other, meaning review the previous, existing, as well as the new).
    3. I don’t know about the current Pravda. RT.ru, today is better than any U.S. media, corporate or government directed. A compliment to Russia emergent as a free nation and one that respects diversity, and no compliment to the manipulated and manipulating media of the current U.S. government, being Corporately sovietized from a free nation.

    GK James,
    “What specifically” begins with the nation Russia not being an actual adversary to the nation United States, wherefore, why is the Media puffing that it is? There is no contest between the two nations, except manufactured, which manufacture is low-grade, slow-ball and fundamentally sleazy. Review and consider the business with Olympic Athletes, for an example, the favored drugs-enhanced being “exempted” by manufactured excusery not available to others and specifically not to the non-adversary designated adversary. You can find equivalent double-standarding just about everywhere else in current U.S. policies, across the spectrum, foreign and domestic. Advocated and enhanced by Media bloviating and blathering, with reporters huffing and puffing and writing hyperventilations to hype hysterias. Consider the whole “Russian Interference in U.S. Elections!” business, which is all air, with no proofs, and which ANY competent non-politicized investigative agency would have proved unfound and declared campaign hype before November 2016. Consider the repeated blow-ups of bullshit blathering and hyperventilating about “gas attacks by Syria”, with Trump making an ass of himself and a brainless monstrosity of the U.S. with his “show ’em we’re tough” (in reality show ’em we’re stupid and dangerous and incompetent as a nation) by blasting a “shoot first and pretend we had reason after” barrage of missiles.
    The list can go on and on.

    WaPo is one of the most blatant blowers of blithering propaganda, and just happened to be the one fobbing more breathless back-fence gossip in the current case. The NYT is only not quite as blatant and nakedly propagandistic in its presentation.

    None are rationally reporting, all are rushing out breathless gossip, fixing on details and blowing them up into bulbous bubbleous vapid vapourings.

    And it ain’t “fake news”, because the perpetrators are seriously trying to sell it as “real”. The crap they are flogging is not just false, but falsification, deliberately enhanced-with-hysteria hyperventilations.

    Treating such crap, pseido-information and pure propaganda seriously does not enhance the garbage to quality, it denigrates the ‘serious’ discussion to peurility.

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