Pompeo’s Role in Perpetuating Russiagate

Nov. 1, 2020 (EIRNS)—In an Oct. 26 article in Consortium News in which he gives an overview of the contents of WikiLeaks’s “Vault 7” release of CIA material, journalist Patrick Lawrence recounts suspicious aspects of the negotiations between WikiLeaks and the Department of Justice to reach an immunity deal for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. He sources his knowledge about those negotiations to a June 25, 2018 article in The Hill by John Solomon.

Assange had made it known that he had a considerable trove of CIA material ready for release, and that he was willing to reveal evidence of who was not responsible for the theft of DNC emails in 2016. Assange’s attorneys made the peculiar choice of approaching Washington, D.C. lawyer Adam Waldman, who then made overtures to none other than Bruce Ohr at the Department of Justice and Sen. Mark Warner on the Senate Intelligence Committee, who contacted FBI Director James Comey.

It is difficult to imagine worse people to get in touch with! None of these three had any interest in debunking Russiagate. Comey spiked the talks, and after a fourth release of material from what WikiLeaks had named “Vault 7,” then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo made a speech at CSIS declaring WikiLeaks “a nonstate hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia.” In Lawrence’s words, “With the CSIS speech, Pompeo effectively opened the Trump Administration’s rigorously pressed campaign to have Assange extradited from Britain.”

From that point, there was no motion on the negotiations with Assange, which could have prevented the release of CIA material and exploded the central, ostensibly precipitating thesis of Russiagate. Why would the CIA director decline to protect his Agency’s secrets and defend his boss, the President, from what he knew were baseless accusations?

With “friends” like Mike Pompeo, President Trump doesn’t need enemies.