The headlines on the recent Yahoo News article on the CIA’s plans to kidnap or kill Julian Assange properly feature the outrageous, out-of-control deliberations within the US’s intelligence community. However, two key features have been seriously overlooked. First, while the article tries to suggest that Trump was ‘in on the deal’ - and many of the media’s stories feature just that - in fact, CIA head Pompeo, and others at the CIA, did everything they could to steer around Trump.
The “evidence” on Trump provided is from one “former senior CIA official… [who] said he was briefed on a spring 2017 meeting in which the president asked whether the CIA could assassinate Assange and provide him ‘options’ for how to do so. It was viewed as unhinged and ridiculous.” The item is the only one in the long article which doesn’t cite multiple sources, but rather relies on only one - and that one is relating second-hand a story told to him. Ask: Who at the CIA was more on the inside than the “senior CIA official” and was briefing him on a meeting with Trump at the White House – except Pompeo - the man who throughout the article’s narrative was steering around Trump?
