Republican Sen. James Lankford said in a radio interview Monday that the US intelligence community is not working against President-elect Donald Trump, despite his suggestions to the contrary.
“I don’t see them working against Donald Trump,” the Oklahoma senator and member of the Select Committee on Intelligence said on the “Kilmeade and Friends” radio program. “They may agree or disagree with policy directions that he wants to take, but the people that I’ve interacted with, I haven’t seen anyone in that community that’s working against Donald Trump.”
Trump has accused members of the intelligence community of leaking negative information on him, comparing their actions to those of Nazi Germany. Outgoing CIA Director John Brennan hit back a Trump’s comparison in an interview with The Wall Street Journal Monday, saying, “Tell the families of those 117 CIA officers who are forever memorialized on our wall of honor that their loved ones who gave their lives were akin to Nazis.”
Lankford added that leaks are to be expected during a time of transition.
“I would tell you that there’s a transition of leadership happening, Mike Pompeo will be the new director of the CIA and one of the things that happens when there’s a transition like this, a lot information comes out.
“The old leadership is gone and so no one is protecting old leadership anymore — their documents, their statements. New leadership comes in, and a lot of things come to light. So we’ll see that across the entire intelligence community and some things come out as that transition happens. From what I have seen, I’ve not seen individuals working against him. I’ve seen a lot men and women that are doing a very difficult task that will gather intelligence for the United States.”