Trump asks Rep. Mike Pompeo to be CIA director, sources say

Representative Mike Pompeo, President-elect Donald Trump’s surprise choice to head the Central Intelligence Agency, supports the USA government’s sweeping collection of Americans’ communications data and wants to scrap the nuclear deal with Iran.

Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn will serve as Trump’s national security advisor. Schiff was quite critical of Trump’s decision to give Flynn should an important national security role.

Although he was confirmed by the Senate for his U.S. Attorney post in 1981, he was denied a federal judgeship in 1986 when a Senate panel failed to advance his nomination amid allegations he had made racially-charged remarks, which he denied.

In fact, Pompeo, Sessions and Flynn have been some of the toughest members of their party on Clinton’s use of a private email server, with Flynn leading “lock her up” chants at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland this summer and Sessions criticizing the handling of her investigation by FBI Director James Comey.

The official said retired Lieutenant General Mike Flynn was chosen as the president-elect’s national security adviser, a position that does not require US Senate confirmation.

Grassley added that as a former US attorney, Sessions has the right background. Jeff Sessions has been picked for attorney general. Ellison, who is a Democrat as well as a Muslim, reportedly told ABC News he told Pompeo in part, “let me guarantee you, Muslims are condemning terrorism every day all the time”.

The first two African-American attorneys general will be succeeded by a man who (allegedly) called the N.A.A.C.P. “Communist-inspired”, disdains the Voting Rights Act as “intrusive”, and once “joked” to a black colleague that he thought the Ku Klux Klan was fine “until I found out they smoked pot”.

He also has been a fierce critic of the nuclear deal with Iran that President Barack Obama has championed. In tapping Sessions and Flynn, Trump is also rewarding a pair of loyalists who were among his most ardent supporters during the presidential campaign.

He has also strongly opposed the controls Congress set on data collection on American citizens by the CIA, National Security Agency and other agencies after the NSA’s unauthorized sweeping of phone data was exposed in 2013. He’s also the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Donald Trump has tapped an immigration hardliner and a former intelligence officer to be top members of his administration.

Flynn has called for Washington to work more closely with Moscow, echoing similar statements from Trump.

But it’s Flynn’s Russian Federation connections that have some foreign-policy experts more anxious.

Trump must choose thousands of appointees and nominees who will oversee the nation’s security, economy, foreign affairs and domestic policies. In 2014, Pompeo criticized Obama for “ending our interrogation program” and said intelligence officials “are not torturers, they are patriots”.

Pompeo, a member of the House Intelligence Committee who has represented Kansas’ 4th district since 2011, told Congress in 2013 that Muslim leaders across the United States who fail to condemn terror attacks motivated by radical Islamic beliefs are “potentially complicit in these acts, and more importantly still, in those that may well follow”. Trump responded by repeatedly referring to Romney as a “loser”. Trump has called the agreement “the stupidest deal of all time”.

Sessions’s offer was finalized Thursday and the senator has been working with staff to lay the groundwork for an official announcement, said one person close to the transition, who requested anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

Trump’s actions Thursday aimed to show that he could soften his rhetoric, offer pragmatism in the White House and reaffirm longstanding American alliances.