"Rogue employees" at the CIA are leaking information to the news media about alleged Russian hacks to discredit President-elect Donald Trump, former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Pete Hoekstra told Newsmax TV on Wednesday.
"It is not the agency that is doing this," the former Michigan Republican congressman told "The Joe Pags Show." "It is rogue employees within the CIA who are leaking this information."
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Hoekstra noted The Washington Post report last week about a CIA assessment Moscow's efforts to sway the election toward Trump conflicted with Director of National Intelligence James Clapper's congressional testimony last month that agencies lacked strong evidence linking the Kremlin to such hacking.
He attributed the Post report to CIA leaks to the media.
"Someone just confirmed that to me today that this is not people who are in the briefings leaking the information," Hoekstra told host Joe Pagliarulo. "This is people, isolated people within the CIA who got an ax to grind with Trump, or maybe with Republicans in general, and they are leaking this information.
"They're leaking it selectively — and they're leaking it to a media that wants to embrace it and wants to run with it.
"The media is not running it through the normal hoops that you would want them to go through to verify that the source and the accusations are even accurate."
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