Story highlights Pompeo was speaking at a defense forum

Former CIA Director Leon Panetta had a differing view

Washington (CNN) CIA Director Mike Pompeo said Saturday that President Donald Trump's prolific Twitter feed was yielding valuable intelligence.

"I've actually seen it help us," Pompeo told the audience at The Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, California, when asked whether Trump's Twitter activity was making his job harder.

"I have seen things the President has put on his Twitter account actually have a real-world impact on our capacity to understand what's going on in other places of the world," Pompeo said.

"Our adversaries responded to those tweets in ways that were helpful to us to understand command and control issues, who's listening to what messages, how those messages are resonating around the world," he added.

But one of Pompeo's predecessors, former CIA Director Leon Panetta, offered a contrasting opinion, taking issue with the President's tweets, particularly ones that some have labeled as anti-Muslim.

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