Former CIA director Mike Pompeo responds to EXPLOSIVE Julian Assange story: 'I make no apologies'

Former CIA Director Mike Pompeo joined Glenn Beck on the radio program to give his response to the explosive new report from Yahoo News alleging some Trump officials — including Pompeo — considered kidnapping or assassinating WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

"I would say three things. First of all, [Michael] Isikoff, we've seen he was a big Russia hoax perpetrator. So take that for what it's worth," Pompeo said of the Yahoo News report's co-author. "Second, there are many stories out there now about how the president and I were engaged in things that were crazy, right? There was talk about there being an effort to drop a nuclear weapon on China in the last week of the administration. This story is of that same ilk, right? I couldn't tell you who they have as their sources, but those sources didn't know what we were doing."

"The third point ... we were very worried about the fact that we had bad actors who were stealing really, really sensitive material from the United States," Pompeo added. "And I make no apologies for the fact that we, and the administration, were working diligently to make sure that we were able to protect this important sensitive information, whether it was cyber actors in Russia, or the Chinese military, or anyone who was trying to take this information away from us. And not just commercial stuff, like intellectual property theft, but real national security secrets. So we were working hard to go after those bad actors who were trying to do that."

Glenn asked Pompeo if he would classify Julian Assange and WikiLeaks to be a "journalist in a media outlet, or a hostile intelligence entity."

"So I came to believe that they were, in fact, one of the first, non-state, hostile intelligence entities," Pompeo answered. "They weren't engaged in even crappy reporting, like Isikoff does. They were engaged in active efforts to steal secrets themselves, and pay others to do the same in a way that violated the central understandings that I think the American people get, and second, violated U.S. law as well. We're always careful. I'm all about a big, bold, strong First Amendment. But these folks were acting in ways that were deeply inconsistent with that."

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