Former CIA director James Woolsey has split with Trump, 'effective immediately'

Former CIA director James Woolsey will not longer serve as a senior advisor to President-elect Donald Trump, CNN reporter Jeremy Diamond tweeted on Thursday.

Woolsey came under fire last week after implying to CNN's Jim Scuitto that Trump could be "playing us" with regard to what he knows about Russia's role in hacking the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign chairman John Podesta.

"There's a possibility that he is [playing us] a little bit," Woolsey said, referring to Trump's statement at a New Year's Eve party at his Mar-A-Lago estate in Florida that he would reveal what he knows about the hacking campaign on "Tuesday or Wednesday" of this week.

 "Why not?" Woolsey added. "He [Trump] is not interfering with anything. He's not talking about anything classified... This is a behavioral mode that he has perfected. He has a point, which is that it is entirely possible to have various definitions of hacking."

Woolsey also downplayed the intelligence report produced by his former agency that said that Russia was behind the hacking campaign on Podesta and the DNC.

"We may see as time goes on an improved technology for sorting things out in the hacking world, but it is probably not always a good idea to say in these days and times that we know it was Russia, it was only Russia," he told CNN. "No, I'd be a little more cautious than that...I think the Russians were in there, but it doesn't mean other people weren't."

 This story is developing.