Former CIA director splits with Trump team

A former CIA director who had been advising Donald Trump on national security said he will no longer be involved with the president-elect or the transition effort. 

A spokesman for James Woolsey said in a statement Thursday: “Effective immediately, Ambassador Woolsey is no longer a Senior Advisor to President-Elect Trump or the Transition. He wishes the President-Elect and his Administration great success in their time in office.”  

In an appearance on CNN Thursday, Woolsey said he hasn’t been advising Trump lately and simply wanted to remove the title. 

{mosads}“I didn’t want to fly under false colors. I’ve been an adviser and felt that I was making a contribution, and I strongly support Mr. Trump for president — did since early September — and I wish him well,” he said.

“But I’m not really functioning as an adviser anymore, and so when I’m on screen everybody announces that I’m former CIA director and that I’m a Trump adviser, and I’m really not anymore. So I just thought I should strike that from the chyron … so nobody was under false impressions, that’s all.”

People close to Woolsey told The Washington Post that he had been excluded from intelligence discussions in recent weeks with Trump and his incoming top national security adviser, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn. 

Sources said that he has become uncomfortable lending his name to the transition without being included, especially in light of reports that Trump is looking to reshape the country’s intelligence agencies — a report Trump’s incoming press secretary denied.  

In his appearance on CNN, Woolsey denied that Trump’s tension with U.S. intelligence over Russia’s hacking of U.S. political organizations, or any other single issue, prompted him to cut ties. He said there was no particular point at which he stopped advising the Trump team.  

Woolsey said he has only met with Trump in person a few times. He was named part of the national security advisory council in early October. 

When confronted with the Washington Post report in an appearance on Fox News later Thursday evening, Woolsey did not deny its reporting, saying that the story focused on an “important issue” of how Trump may change the intelligence agencies. 

He did seem to confirm that he has not in recent weeks been asked to participate in national security talks, saying, “I was not really called upon to go to meetings or participate in work on the transition.” He said he spent more time talking to the press about national security issues. 

— Updated at 9:41 p.m.