Ex-CIA Officer Goes Rogue, Says Trump Should Get CIA Investigated by Senate
Former CIA officer John Kiriakou encouraged President Donald Trump on Monday to solicit the Senate to investigate the intelligence agency based on the conduct of the so-called Ukraine whistleblower.
The New York Times reported last week that the whistleblower is a CIA officer who was detailed to the White House, but has since returned to the agency, according to “three people familiar with the matter.”
Lawyers for the whistleblower have refused to confirm that their client works for the CIA.
Their client’s complaint reads in part, “In the course of my official duties, I have received information from multiple U.S. Government officials that the President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election.”
The whistleblower goes on to cite Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky among other matters, alleging that Trump tried to pressure his Ukrainian counterpart to investigate former vice president and current Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden.
Kiriakou told Fox News host Tucker Carlson Monday night that he made a whistleblower complaint in the 1990s while he was working at the CIA.
But unlike the current whistleblower, Kiriakou wrote up a memo and submitted it to the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community, who then gave it to the relevant agency’s head.
“In this case, this went through layers of editing and coordinating and lawyers were involved and managers were involved,” Kiriakou said. “It looks like a legal document. It doesn’t look like a whistleblower complaint.”
“And that leads me to believe that this whistleblower that we keep talking about is just the face of an entire group that’s at the CIA that’s pushing this thing forward.”
In the complaint, the whistleblower writes about speaking with “multiple U.S. officials” as the source of some of the claims he makes.
“These people who run the CIA, almost all of them are holdovers from the Obama administration,” Kiriakou said. “They became senior intelligence officials, senior intelligence service officers during the Obama presidency, and they’re holdovers.”
Carlson asked the former CIA officer if he had any advice for Trump in light of these facts.
“If I could give the president advice, I would say to turn to the Senate, turn to the Senate majority leader and ask for an investigation of the CIA,” Kiriakou said.
“We need hearings on the CIA and reform in the CIA because this is not the way this whistleblower system is supposed to work,” he added.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer warned Trump before he took office in January 2017, “You take on the intelligence community — they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”
But “getting back at” the president is not the job of intelligence agencies. They are to serve the American people.
The taxpayers are not funding the CIA so that it can be used as an arm of the Democratic Party and even attempt to undermine the 2016 election by removing a duly elected president.
An investigation is clearly in order to determine if the CIA has in fact gone rogue.
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