‘It Was Probably Both’: Greenwald on Whether CIA Was ‘Playing Games’ With Election Instead of Russia
In the wake of WikiLeaks’ recent release of documents purporting to be from the CIA revealing much of the agency’s spying and hacking methods, The Intercept co-founder Glenn Greenwald — who won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on Edward Snowden — appeared on CNN’s Smerconish to discuss these latest leaks.
Speaking to host Michael Smerconish, Greenwald responded to a question on whether he agrees that this is just the CIA doing its job, telling Smerconish “we don’t know” because the agency does everything “completely in the dark.” He feels that people within the CIA obviously leaked the info so we can have a public debate on all of this.
The reporter also disagreed with the host that this could hurt the CIA’s ability to listen in on terrorist organizations or other bad actors, stating that WikiLeaks redacted the actual codes the CIA was using.
After some more back and forth about leaks and who can get away with or profit from them, the discussion ended with Greenwald essentially lending credence to recent conspiracy theories that it was actually the CIA that meddled in the election instead of Russia in the aftermath of the CIA leak.
“Does Glenn Greenwald give any credence to a conspiracy theory that’s now getting legs which says, hey, wasn’t the Russian playing games with our election, it was actually the CIA playing games with our election?” Smerconish asked Greenwald.
“I think it was probably both,” The Intercept reporter answered. “And not — I think it was not just the CIA and the Russians, but I also think the FBI clearly sided with Donald Trump and did damaging leaks on purpose to hurt Hillary Clinton. It was almost a proxy war, our election was, for unseen forces.”
Watch the clip above, via CNN.
[image via screengrab]
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