Donald Trump vows to gut the CIA, presumably so it can’t further expose his Russia ties

| 3:11 pm EST January 5, 2017
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It appears Donald Trump is now looking to gut the Central Intelligence Agency in the hope of preventing it from further exposing what it knows about his illicit connections to Russia. The CIA led the way in exposing that Russian hackers, at the instruction of Russian President Vladimir Putin, rigged the United States election in Trump’s favor. And now Trump and his advisors are already working on a plan to hobble the spy agency.

The Wall Street Journal is now reporting that Donald Trump and his team are planning to “restructure and pare back” the CIA, which will include cutting back on the number of staff at its headquarters. The unnamed member of Trump’s administration who spoke with the WSJ is insisting that the CIA has become “politicized” and therefore needs to be gutted. But Trump’s real motivation seems rather apparent, and raises even more questions.

The CIA was the first to expose Russia’s attempts at rigging the election for Trump, an assessment which other agencies later came to agree with. This has caused nonstop headaches for Donald Trump since it became public, and he’s largely responded by attacking the intelligence community on Twitter. But his new move to gut the CIA, presumably to protect his own secrets, serves to put the United States in a dangerously vulnerable position.