The Racist, Sexist, Bigoted Sexual Predator Doesn't Need Daily Intelligence Briefings..

"I get it when I need it," Trump said. "These are very good people that are giving me the briefings," he said, but added, "You know, I'm, like, a smart person.

The Facts

The notion that Obama has skipped his intelligence briefings was promoted by a right-leaning research group called the Government Accountability Institute, which published a report detailing that the president’s daily calendar shows Obama receiving an in-person briefing on the Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) 43.8 percent of his time in office. (The percentage dropped from a high of 48.8 percent in 2010 to 38.2 percent through May of 2012.)

Marc Thiessen, a former Bush speechwriter who writes an opinion column for The Washington Post, then drew attention to what he called the “startling new statistics” in the report. His column on the subject is cited as the source in the American Crossroads ad.

That column also includes the White House’s response — that Obama reads his PDB every day, but he does not always require an in-person briefing every day. The White House argument is that this is how Obama structured his White House operation, so it is specious to say he has “skipped” a meeting that was not actually scheduled.

Thomas S. Blanton, director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University, says that there have been “lots of variation in the briefing patterns” among presidents, with different consequences.

George W. Bush “wanted personal and oral, and that matched CIA’s institutional interest in face to face with the president, much better for their bureaucratic politics, but unclear how good it was for presidential decision making,” he said. “On Iraq WMD [weapons of mass destruction], the direct brief was clearly pernicious; reading might have pointed to the dissents, but the briefers did not.”

In contrast, Bill “Clinton the reader was known to comment that his morning papers were better than the intel brief, and better written — to the point that the CIA director James Woolsey joked that when that Cessna crashed into the White House, that was him seeking an audience with the president.”

Richard Nixon also had few, if any, oral briefings and instead received his intelligence from the morning memo of his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger.

According to a CIA history of the PDB written by John L. Helgerson:

Throughout the Nixon presidency, the PDB was delivered by courier to Kissinger’s office. Each day Kissinger delivered to the President a package of material that included the PDB along with material from the State Department, the White House Situation Room, the Joint Chiefs, and others. Nixon would keep the material on his desk, reading it at his convenience throughout the day. Feedback to the Agency typically was provided by Kissinger directly to the DCI.

Interestingly, the history says that Gerald Ford, who became president when Nixon resigned, decided to add an oral briefing from a CIA official as his first meeting of the morning so he would be better prepared for foreign-policy discussions with Kissinger, who had become Secretary of State.

Jimmy Carter scrapped the oral briefing and instead relied on a one-on-one meeting with his national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski. But he wrote frequent comments on the PDB, so that “the CIA received considerably more feedback from Carter than it had from Ford,” the history said.

Ronald Reagan, meanwhile, also almost never received oral briefings or had meetings with CIA personnel. Here is how the CIA history puts it:

Agency officers who provided daily intelligence support to the White House during the Reagan administration remember that his several national security advisers varied markedly in the time and attention they devoted to the PDB. In all cases, however, they received the Agency’s briefer every day, read the PDB, and ensured that it was forwarded to the President.

Thinking back over the eight years of the two Reagan administrations, the Agency’s briefing officer remembered only one or two occasions when the National Security Adviser took him into the Oval Office to brief the President directly. Unlike Carter, Reagan almost never wrote comments or questions on the PDB.

Then, George H.W. Bush, who had once served as CIA director, reinstituted an oral briefing, read the PDB closely and even examined raw intelligence reports. “CIA’s relationship with Bush was undoubtedly the most productive it had enjoyed with any of the nine presidents it served since the Agency’s founding in 1947,” concluded the history, which was written in 1996.

Robert J Sakimano wrote:Goose providing us with the mainstream media links..  

Never Any Media Bias - Well Maybe Just a Little, All The Time

LooseGoose wrote:

Robert J Sakimano wrote:Goose providing us with the mainstream media links..  

Never Any Media Bias - Well Maybe Just a Little, All The Time

Sorry you're so dense that you fall for the mainstream stories.