So they can just say anything, and then say its opposite a few months later, and not be held to account – even when the “anything” in question involves existential threats to the polity and the country.

In his first speech as director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Mike Pompeo, the former Republican congressman who once applauded disclosures by WikiLeaks, attacked the group on Thursday as a stateless hostile intelligence unit eager to do the bidding of Russia and other American adversaries.

“WikiLeaks walks like a hostile intelligence service and talks like a hostile intelligence service,” Mr. Pompeo said. To support his assessment, he cited how the group had encouraged followers to join the C.I.A. and steal secrets, and how “it overwhelmingly focuses on the United States while seeking support from antidemocratic countries.”

But Mr. Pompeo’s harshest words were reserved for Julian Assange, calling the WikiLeaks founder a “narcissist” and “a fraud — a coward hiding behind a screen.”

And yet Pompeo was saying quite different things a few months ago.

Mr. Pompeo, speaking at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, an independent research group, appeared to have no compunction during the campaign about pointing people toward emails stolen by Russian hackers from the Democratic National Committee and then posted by WikiLeaks.

“Need further proof that the fix was in from Pres. Obama on down? BUSTED: 19,252 Emails from DNC Leaked by WikiLeaks,” he wrote in a Twitter post in July that included a link to a conservative blog. The emails to which the post referred showed that Democratic Party officials favored Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders in the primary.

But hey, they won the election, so now they can drop the lies.

In deploring leakers, Mr. Pompeo opened his remarks on Thursday with an anecdote about Phillip Agee, the former C.I.A. officer who turned against the agency and spent years exposing undercover American spies overseas. He died in Havana in 2008.

Like Mr. Agee, leakers “choose to see themselves in a romantic light,” Mr. Pompeo said. “They cling to this fiction, even though their disclosures often inflict irreparable harm.”

He then turned to WikiLeaks, citing its release of Democratic Party emails stolen by Russian hackers — the same stolen emails he was promoting in July — as evidence of its hostile intent.

“It’s time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is: a nonstate hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia,” he said.

It’s time now…but it wasn’t last July? Last July it was just fine to let Wikileaks and Russia break the knees of the Democrats?

The intel people at the talk didn’t press him on this question.

Mr. Pompeo also escaped any direct questions about how he was managing to heal the rift between the C.I.A. and Mr. Trump, who during the presidential transition compared American intelligence agencies to Nazis.

Asked about his own relationship with the president, Mr. Pompeo said, “it’s fantastic,” adding that he personally delivered Mr. Trump’s intelligence briefing on most days.

Which wouldn’t be the case if it weren’t for Wikileaks and Russia.