Trump's Difficult Time with the CIA

[lpetrich]

CIA book 'Getting To Know The President' looks at fraught relations with Trump : NPR

It's not exactly classified information — former President Donald Trump and the intelligence community didn't get along. But in an updated book, Getting To Know The President, the story is told from the inside.

The author is a former CIA officer, John Helgerson, who spent 38 years at the agency. The publisher is the CIA's in-house research center. And the book is available for free on the CIA website.

Helgerson gets straight to the point: "For the intelligence community, the Trump transition [from candidate to president] was far and away the most difficult in its historical experience with briefing new presidents."

Helgerson says the only comparable case was President Richard Nixon, who was deeply suspicious of the intelligence agencies and basically ignored them, while Trump regularly fought with them in public and private.

Getting to Know the President, Fourth Edition - CIA
What was Trump like?

James Clapper was the director of national intelligence who was responsible for Trump's briefing as he transitioned from candidate to president in late 2016 and early 2017. He said Trump was prone to "fly off on tangents; there might be eight or nine minutes of real intelligence in an hour's discussion."

Clapper says the intelligence community's traditional way of doing business didn't work well with Trump because he "was 'fact-free' — evidence doesn't cut it with him."

Different Presidents have different styles, some preferring oral briefings, some written. Barack Obama liked his briefings in an iPad.

Trump received oral briefings two or three times a week at the beginning of his presidency.

"The single country that occasioned the most discussion with the president during this period was China," Helgerson writes. "North Korea's missile and nuclear programs were priority subjects ... Similarly, coverage continued of developments in Ukraine and Russia; Trump followed both closely."

But in the latter part of his term, Trump's routine called for just two 45-minute briefings a week, Helgerson says.

The author says Trump did not receive intelligence briefings during the final chaotic month of his presidency in late December 2020 through Jan. 20 of this year.

"After the 2020 election, briefings also continued for a period of time. When [CIA briefer Beth] Sanner briefed the president before he went to Mar-a-Lago for the holidays, he commented that he would see her later. The briefings were to resume on 6 January but none were scheduled after the attack on the Capitol," Helgerson writes.

 

[lpetrich]

Donald Trump Never Got Another CIA Classified Intelligence Briefing After Jan. 6 - "He skipped his classified intelligence briefings for the holidays. And then, after his Jan. 6 briefing didn’t happen, he never got another one, a new CIA book reveals."

The situation in the waning days of Trump’s presidency was so uncommon that it actually caused concern among some administration officials that Trump was losing touch with reality, as he was getting unhinged advice on domestic issues from Justice Department attorneys and outside counsel that openly advocated rejecting election results.

"There was no certainty that he was getting objective, unbiased information in any other way,” one source familiar with the matter told The Daily Beast. “You couldn't trust that anybody around him was able to get that information to him in that period of time."

They ought to have invoked the 25th Amendment on him.

Unlike past presidents—who would read their daily intelligence report and occasionally get briefed by a CIA officer—Trump regularly refused to read the text, demanded “killer” pictures, and preferred to get updated in person by his daily briefer.

What a big baby. I keep on saying that about him, but it seems so appropriate for him -- books with lots of pictures, and books read to him by his caregivers.

Liz Harrington, a spokesperson for Trump’s post-presidential office, pushed back against the CIA’s account with a statement saying, “This is Fake News.”

Without evidence, of course. The CIA did not reveal why it did not brief Trump after the attacks on Congress.

 

[lpetrich]

And unlike past presidents, who continue to get intelligence briefings after leaving office, Trump has remained in the dark post-presidency. President Joe Biden went on record in February saying that his predecessor should no longer receive them, implying that he had made the decision to cut off Trump. A Trump aide, who preferred to remain unnamed, told The Daily Beast a very different story on Tuesday.

“They never got cancelled by Biden, he didn’t cut them off,” the aide said. “President Trump didn’t feel it would be appropriate after leaving so he stopped them. He would have continued to get them if he wanted.”

???

The CIA book’s new chapter also described at length how Trump himself posed a challenge for the nation’s intelligence officials, especially at the beginning of his presidency, when he was mired in accusations of suspicious ties to Russia and lashed out against the nation’s surveillance networks.

“For the Intelligence Community, the Trump transition was far and away the most difficult in its historical experience with briefing new presidents,” the book states. “Rather than shut the IC out, Trump engaged with it, but attacked it publicly.”

It seems like Trump had something to hide. He ought to have been more forthcoming about what was going on in those contacts.
US intelligence community 'struggled' to brief Trump, CIA study says - CNNPolitics

The US intelligence community "struggled" to brief President-elect Donald Trump in 2016, achieving "only limited success" in educating and developing a relationship with the incoming president, according to a newly released unclassified history of the transition period published by the CIA's in-house academic center.

...
The history reports that during the transition period, Trump was typically "pleasant and courteous" during his briefings, which were given by career intelligence officers drawn from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the FBI and the Department of State. Together, the team of 14 briefers "comprised the largest and most organizationally diverse group of experts ever deployed for transition briefings of candidates and presidents-elect."

Even later in his presidency, at moments when Trump was publicly expressing deep frustration with the intelligence community, "briefings continued as usual and Trump's demeanor during the sessions remained the same," the history reports.

But as the intelligence community was drawn into the major political dramas surrounding Trump — in particular, the public furor over a dossier compiled by a former British intelligence officer containing purported compromising information on the president-elect that Trump believed had been leaked by the IC — he increasingly lashed out at the intelligence community in public.

According to one previously unreported anecdote, Trump during his second pre-election briefing on Sept. 2, 2016 assured his briefers that "the nasty things he was saying publicly about the intelligence community "don't apply to you."

As a comparison,

The history also provides some insight into briefings given to 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, recounting one pre-election intelligence briefing given to Clinton at the FBI field office in White Plains, New York, in August of that year.

"Given all that Clinton was going through related to her handling of personal emails during the campaign, Gistaro regretted that the first question the security officer asked Clinton as she approached the room was whether she had any cell phones with her," the history recounts. "The Secretary very professionally assured the questioner that she had left her cell phones at home.

 

[lpetrich]

Trump’s Intelligence Briefings: Better Than Some Feared, Worse Than Many Hoped - Lawfare

Reporters working the national security beat during Donald Trump’s single term in the White House wrote more frequently than during most administrations about the current president’s interactions with his intelligence community. No surprise there; much of that relationship seemed to play out in public view. Trump’s campaign derided the intelligence community’s judgments about Russian interference in the 2016 contest with the barb, “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.” President-elect Trump compared U.S. intelligence officers to Nazis. On his first full day in office, he used the backdrop of the CIA’s venerated Memorial Wall to brag about his appearances on the cover of Time magazine and the size of his inauguration crowd. Eighteen months later, Trump stood side by side with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki and publicly undercut his own intelligence agencies about the Russian interference assessment.

And yet, even with all of that attention, details about Trump’s intelligence briefings came mostly from anonymous sources—until recently, that is.

Then mentioning that CIA publication.

Well ahead of the 2016 campaign, President Barack Obama told officers in his Cabinet about his appreciation for the helpful and cooperative transition efforts of his predecessor, George W. Bush, and instructed his team to exceed that level of assistance to the next president. Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper took this as license not only to set up the decades-long tradition of providing intelligence briefings to the major-party presidential candidates but also to add extra steps allowing the intelligence community to avoid even the appearance of politicization. Clapper stressed that the briefings would come from career intel officers, not political appointees—and that the group creating Obama’s President’s Daily Brief (PDB) and briefing it to administration officials would be completely separate from the group doing the same for the candidates’ briefings.

 

[Keith&Co.]

“They never got cancelled by Biden, he didn’t cut them off,” the aide said. “President Trump didn’t feel it would be appropriate after leaving so he stopped them. He would have continued to get them if he wanted.”

???

The... the man who has a Presidential-looking seal on his stationary, and signs it President Trump, from the White House of the South, and insists he should be reinstated, thought getting intel briefs would be inappropriate to stay up to date on intel snce he's not President.

Yeah.
Riiiiiiight.

 

[lpetrich]

Almost as if he wants to be President without doing the work of the Presidency.

 

[Shadowy Man]

Almost as if he wants to be President without doing the work of the Presidency.

Ding ding ding!!!