CIA director pushes back on claim in Wolff book: Trump reads

CIA Director Mike Pompeo pushed back Sunday on a claim that President Trump does not read, calling the assertions made in author Michael Wolff’s explosive new book on the White House “absurd.” 

“This president reads material that we provide to him. He listens closely to his daily briefing,” Pompeo told Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday.”

{mosads}”This president is an avid consumer of the work product that our team at the CIA produces and we do our best to convey that to him every day,” he continued. 

Pompeo was responding to a reported quote in Wolff’s book “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House” from chief economic adviser Gary Cohn, saying the president will not read anything, including “one-page memos and brief policy papers.”

Wolff, who said he had access to the White House for a year to write his book, also quoted Cohn in the book as saying Trump gets up halfway through meetings with world leaders “because he is bored.” 

“I think the two fundamental issues were that Donald Trump doesn’t read anything. Let me accent that — anything. Nothing,” Wolff told NPR. “If you’re working for the president of the United States, that’s an odd position because how do you get information to him? That’s already a major hurdle. But then there’s the second hurdle — that not only does he not read; he doesn’t listen. So it becomes from Day one, the crisis of the presidency: You can’t tell him anything.”

Pompeo’s comments follow the release of the book, which has shaken Washington.

The White House and the president have pushed back on the claims made in the book, saying they are untrue. Pompeo dismissed questions about the book as “ludicrous” and called it a “passing moment in history” attempting to distract from the work of the Trump administration.