WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Donald Trump led the swearing-in ceremony for the first female CIA director in the agency’s history on Monday, calling it “a ceremony like few will ever have again.”
Vice President Mike Pence administered the oath.
“They love you,” Trump said as officials and agents applauded Haspel during the ceremony. “They respect you. They respect you too.”
“Gina is tough, she is strong” and “will never ever back down,” he said.
Haspel, a career officer, won Senate confirmation last week after a contentious process that focused on her role in the CIA’s use of overseas prisons to torture suspects in hopes of gleaning information on terrorism after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Haspel, in her own remarks, noted that it’s been more than 50 years since a career officer has led the agency. She pledged to represent rank-and-file agents. “For me, being director is about doing right by all of you,” she said.
She also took in the historic moment, saying, “I stand on the shoulders of heroines who never saw acclaim” and pointing to two girls — ages 6 and 8 — in the audience.
“We did it,” Haspel said.
The venue, CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., is significant for Trump. Trump raised concerns in the agency when he spoke there on his first full day in office last year — making highly political comments and misrepresentations about the media and crowd sizes at his inauguration while standing in front of a wall that memorialized fallen agents.
Trump faced suspicion and concern from agents at the time, particularly after he likened their tactics to Nazis’.
Trump stuck mostly to script Monday, extolling the fallen agents whose names are on the wall while telling Haspel the nation is “counting on you to confront a wide array of threats we face.”
He praised the agents in the room. But Trump remains embroiled in conflict with many in the intelligence community, especially the Justice Department, as it continues to probe whether Trump’s campaign colluded with Russians and whether he worked to obstruct that investigation. Trump said Sunday he would demand an investigation into the FBI’s use of a covert intelligence source, a practice also used widely at the CIA, which is highly protective of those sources’ identities.
