This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, February 28th, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown, as Russia appears to be gearing up to meddle in this year's presidential

election, it's not clear that the White House is taking that news and a great deal of other news

particularly well. It's also not clear who will be advising the president on matters

of national intelligence in the coming months. Cato's Julian Sanchez discusses the last few weeks in the ongoing... the House deals with bothersome events.

To the shakeup in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence began a couple of weeks ago with a briefing to members of Congress by Shelby Pearson who had been heading

up election security efforts within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence

confirmed to those members of Congress, Republicans and Democrats present,

that Russia was once again gearing up to interfere in the

2020 election and was doing so with an eye toward assisting President Trump.

There's been some debate in the aftermath of that

how accurate that was.

There are two separate findings at least.

One that they're interfering and two, they seem to have assessed that they're interfering and two, they seem to have

assessed that they believe that President Trump is someone that they can work with and

is not averse to rush an interest.

There's a question of whether it was

eliding significant nuance to say bluntly, the goal of the interference was to re-elect President Trump, although

given what occurred since it's hard to know what to make of some of the walkback

that's happening as a result of

that. But when President Trump learned of this briefing, which he appears to have

initially believed mistakenly was a direct personal briefing to Adam Schiff, the chair of the

...