CIA Director Mike Pompeo said on Saturday that President Donald Trump's Twitter activity has helped his agency in gathering intelligence.
"I've actually seen it help us," Pompeo told Fox News host Bret Baier at the Reagan National Defense Forum. "I have seen things the president has put on his Twitter account actually have a real-world impact on our capacity to understand what's going on in other places of the world.
"That is, our adversaries responded to those tweets in ways that were helpful to us to understand command and control issues, who's listening to what messages, how those messages are resonating around the world."
Pompeo, a former Kansas Republican congressman, was interviewed by Baier during the forum, in its fifth year, at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif.
His comments were reported by The Hill.
In addition, Obama administration Defense Secretary and CIA Director Leon Panetta joined Pompeo in a panel discussion during the forum.
He said that Trump's social media habits could have strong consequences, citing this week's furor over the president re-tweeting three videos from a British right-wing group purporting to show Muslims carrying out violent acts.
British Prime Minister Theresa May and other U.K. and U.S. politicians slammed Trump for the retweets.
"The problem of tweeting an anti-Muslim video like that is once it goes out, what it does is it inflames the people that are out there," Panetta said, the Hill reports.
"And the problem is that lives can be jeopardized."
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