Trump reportedly asked Mike Pompeo to investigate claims that DNC emails were leaked from within

Last month, CIA Director Mike Pompeo reportedly met with a former National Security Agency official who co-authored a forensic study arguing that the Democratic National Committee's emails were leaked from within — at President Trump's behest. The former NSA official, William Binney, told The Intercept that Pompeo said Trump had encouraged him to speak to Binney if he "want[ed] to know the facts."

In July, Binney and group of former U.S. intelligence officials released a memo under the name Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity that claimed that the DNC emails were leaked rather than hacked by Russian operatives. An examination of the metadata from "Gufficer 2.0," the hacker who took responsibility for breaching the DNC, revealed that the stolen email data was "copied onto a storage device at a speed that far exceeds an Internet capability for a remote hack," the report claimed.

During the hour-long meeting, which allegedly took place Oct. 24, Pompeo reportedly questioned Binney about the claims made in the VIPS memo and asked Binney if he'd be willing to discuss his findings with other intelligence officials. When asked by The Intercept about the alleged meeting, a CIA spokesman declined to comment. "As a general matter, we do not comment on the director's schedule," the spokesman said.

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Pompeo has previously expressed skepticism toward Russian interference in the 2016 election. In October, a CIA spokesman corrected Pompeo's claim that Russian meddling "did not affect the election," issuing a statement saying: "The intelligence assessment with regard to Russian election meddling has not changed, and the director did not intend to suggest that it had."