Donald Trump is reportedly planning to revamp top spy agency

President-elect Donald Trump and his top advisers are working on a plan to restructure the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Central Intelligence Agency, The Wall Street Journal reports.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence was founded in 2004, primarily to help intelligence agencies coordinate efforts in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. A person close to the Trump transition team told WSJ that according to Trump, the office has become "bloated and politicized," and the president-elect believes the intelligence community is attempting to undermine his win by saying Russians hacked Democratic groups before the presidential election. When it comes to the CIA, the team wants to cut back on staffing at headquarters and send more people into field posts. Trump has regularly attacked U.S. intelligence agencies on Twitter, dismissing their hacking assessments, and one of his advisers is retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who was pushed out of the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2013 by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and others.

On Wednesday, Trump tweeted that he believed WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who claims he did not receive the information his website leaked from Russia. Since 2012, Assange has lived at the Ecuadorean embassy in London to avoid extradition to Sweden on rape allegations. Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.) said there are two sides to choose from — "some guy living in an embassy on the run from the law.... who has a history of undermining American democracy and releasing classified information to put our troops at risk, or the 17 intelligence agencies sworn to defend us. I'm going with them."

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