At the behest of President Donald Trump, CIA Director Mike Pompeo met with a former intelligence official who has made several appearances on Fox News to peddle a controversial theory that the Democratic National Committee was not hacked, The Intercept reported.
Instead, former National Security Agency official William Binney believes that the troves of damaging information leaked online was an inside job by someone at the DNC, and not the result of Russian hackers.
Binney has no proof of that theory he shared with CIA chief Mike Pompeo during their October meeting, but rather it's a conclusion he drew from reading the online analysis of cyber spy Guccifer 2.0, The Intercept reported.
Binney told The Intercept about the meeting with Pompeo, which the CIA confirmed.
"I was willing to meet Pompeo simply because it was clear to me the intelligence community wasn't being honest here," Binney told The Intercept. "I am quite willing to help people who need the truth to find the truth and not simply have deceptive statements from the intelligence community."
Binney's "truth" from Guccifer 2.0 is at odds with the entire intelligence community's official assessment — including Pompeo — that Russia hacked the DNC, but Trump wanted his top intel chief to take the meeting anyway.
"This is crazy. You've got all these intelligence agencies saying the Russians did the hack. To deny that is like coming out with the theory that the Japanese didn't bomb Pearl Harbor," one former CIA officer told The Intercept.
It's not clear how Trump knew enough about Binney to urge Pompeo to take the meeting, though Binney has appeared on Fox News at least 10 times since September of 2016 to peddle his theory, The Intercept reported.
Binney retired from the NSA in 2001 after sparring with his employer over data programs, prompting his complaints to the inspector general at the Defense Department.
Binney was later falsely accused by the George W. Bush administration of leaking details about the domestic spying program to the press.
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