Trump to visit CIA after campaign acrimony

(Image credit: Pool/Getty Images)

last updated 21 January 2017

After starting his second day in office with a stop at the interfaith National Prayer Service, President Trump is scheduled to visit the CIA. His nominee for CIA director, Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.), is not expected to be confirmed until Monday at the soonest, but the visit may be designed to smooth relations with the agency after longstanding campaign controversy.

The event "is over capacity at 300+," tweeted Press Secretary Sean Spicer of Trump's visit to the CIA's headquarters at Langley. "Excited to thank the men and women of the intelligence community."

For weeks before taking office, Trump rejected the CIA's conclusion that Russia attempted to manipulate the U.S. election on his behalf, dismissing the U.S. intelligence community as "the same people that said Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction." As recently as last week, Trump said in a press conference that it is "disgraceful" American intelligence agencies like the CIA allowed the unverified dossier on his alleged ties to Russia to be released. "That's something that Nazi Germany would have done and did do," he charged.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.

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