CIA is run by political appointees of Obama administration: Writer

US Defence Secretary Ash Carter (left) and CIA Director John Brennan

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has issued a report against US President-elect Donald Trump because the spy agency is run by political appointees of the Obama administration, according to Dave Lindorff, an American author and investigative journalist.

On Friday, the CIA concluded that Russia intervened in the November 8 election to help Trump win the White House.

President Barack Obama, a Democrat, ordered a full review of alleged hacking by Russians into the 2016 US election even before The Washington Post published a report on the CIA findings.

Trump said on Sunday that Democrats were behind the news reports on intelligence assessments that Russian hackers had intervened to help Trump defeat his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton in the election.

Lindorff, a columnist for Counter Punch and a contributor to Business Week and other news organizations, told press TV that it is “clear that at this point there is an effort by the Democratic administration of President Obama and Democratic Party leaders both in Congress and in the Democratic Party leadership to blame the staggering loss of the Democratic Party in the last election on the Russians.”

“So there is this whole trope out there that the Russians hacked the Democratic National Committee’s server, and Clinton server and then leaked the information to WikiLeaks and then threw the election by exposing all this corruption in the primaries, and so on. Therefore the Russians shifted the election in favor of Trump, but there is no hard evidence for that,” Lindorff said on Sunday during a phone interview with Press TV.

“Now you have the CIA coming out and say: ‘Well, we know the Russians did it.’ But, again with no evidence, so Trump and his people are rejecting that,” he stated.

“What’s basically at works here is that the CIA is run by political appointees of the Obama administration. It gets a little tricky because historically that’s not a position -- the CIA director is not a position -- that is changed at a whim by each president as they come in.  It’s supposed to be above politics, like the FBI director,” the analyst noted.

“But Trump has the ability to do that when he comes in, he can appoint the new CIA director. He has already named the suggested person. So he and the current CIA seem to be at logger heads,” he explained.

“I think what’s likely to happen is that he [Trump] will appoint this new director and the CIA will become the creature of the Trump administration,” the commentator concluded.


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