Former Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan said Saturday that he is “deeply saddened and angered” by President Donald Trump’s “despicable display of self-aggrandizement” during a speech in front of CIA employees.
Speaking at the spy agency he spent months disparaging, Trump attacked the media for accurately reporting the crowd size at his inauguration, criticized reporters over claims he removed a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. from the Oval Office and told his audience that “probably almost everybody in this room voted for me.”
In his first press briefing, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer attacked reporters and also peddled the lie that “this was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period,” despite photos and crowd estimates clearly saying otherwise.
Standing in front of a wall studded with 117 chiseled stars ― each for an agent who died in the line of duty ― Trump also told CIA officials that the U.S. should have “kept the oil” after invading Iraq.
“Now I said it for economic reasons,” he said. “But if you think about it, Mike, if we kept the oil, you probably wouldn’t have ISIS because that’s where they made their money in the first place, so we should have kept the oil.”
Taking Iraq’s oil would be a violation of international law and United Nations agreements.
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