During intelligence briefings, former President Donald Trump was “fact free” and prone to “fly off on tangents,” said James Clapper, former director of national intelligence.
Clapper’s comments come from a recently released CIA publication, Getting to Know the President, which chronicles the relationship between the intelligence community and U.S. presidents during their transition and administration. Written by retired intelligence officer John L. Helgerson, the latest chapter covers Trump and reveals how unprepared and unconventional Trump was. It is important to note, however, that this is not a neutral account, given Trump’s rocky history with the intelligence agencies.
“Briefing Trump presented the IC with the most difficult challenges it had ever faced,” Helgerson wrote. According to the report, the intelligence community struggled large part because Trump “doubted the competence of intelligence professionals and felt no need for regular intelligence support.” Not since Nixon, nearly 50 years earlier, did the nation’s intelligence staff have such a difficult time with a president, Helgerson said.
Trump’s public and vocal criticism of the intelligence community created tension between them. Which is why, during one of his first intelligence briefings while he was still a candidate, Helgerson reported that briefers “were surprised” when Trump “assured them that ‘the nasty things he was saying’ publicly about the intelligence community ‘don’t apply to you.’ ” Then, in a televised debate with Hillary Clinton on Sept. 7, Trump claimed that briefers’ “body language” had suggested they were “not happy” with Obama’s policies.
After he was elected, Trump delayed receiving intelligence briefings by a week because his team was “not fully prepared to launch transition operations, apparently having not expected to win the election.” “Some awkwardness developed,” Helgerson wrote, when CIA personnel wanted to share printed classified information with Trump at Trump Tower, but no one on his staff wanted to be responsible for it and they had no way to store it securely. To solve the problem, the CIA installed a safe.
Even once Trump started receiving the President’s Daily Brief (PDB), a daily summary of high-level national security and intelligence issues, Trump chose not to read it, according to Ted Gistaro, a career CIA analyst who frequently briefed Trump. This backed up earlier reports that Trump did not read the PDB. “He touched it,” Gistaro said when asked how closely Trump read the briefs. “He doesn’t really read anything.”
Clapper agreed with Gistaro, telling Helgerson, “Trump doesn’t read much; he likes bullets.” Instead, during the Trump administration, the briefer would summarize aloud key points since the last briefing and provide three documents (none more than a page) about new developments abroad. This was all part of an effort to make the PDB…
Read More: Trump Was ‘Fact Free’ During Briefings, Says Former Intel. Director