CIA Director Mike Pompeo took the occasion of an interview by New York Times columnist Bret Stephens at the Aspen Security Forum yesterday to call out the Times for disclosing the identity of the CIA new officer in charge of Iran operations. The Times’s wantonly destructive article blowing the identity of the CIA officer required a little help from its friends — the usual cadre of “current and former intelligence officials” who collude with the Times in its dirty work.
BizPac Review quotes Pompeo: “We had a publication you work for Bret, that published the name of an undercover officer at the Central Intelligence Agency,” a visibly angry Pompeo told Bret Stephens onstage at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado. “I find that unconscionable.” The BizPac Review article notes that “Pompeo earned a thunderous round of applause” for his comments.
I wish I could have been there to join in. Pompeo deserved a standing ovation.
For the record, here is the June 2 New York Times story to which Pompeo was referring, reported by Matthew Rosenberg and Adam Goldman. Rosenberg and Goldman should at the least be summoned before a grand jury and required to identify their sources or be held in contempt.
Below is the complete one-hour video of the interview posted by the Aspen Institute. I haven’t yet been able to watch the whole thing and don’t have time at the moment to locate the relevant exchange. FOX News has a good account posted here along with a video clip. However, I can’t get the video clip posted with the FOX News story to play.
Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.