Manipulating Intelligence Then and Now with Robert Draper
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 18 August 2020
⏱️ 45 minutes
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Summary
President Trump's relationship with the intelligence community is back in the news again after allegations that his administration manipulated an intelligence report to show a false equivalency between Russian efforts to interfere in the 2020 presidential election on his behalf and similar efforts by China and Iran on behalf of his opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden. But Trump isn't the first president to try to get the intelligence community to align its assessments with his preferred version of the facts, and he's most likely not the last. This week, Scott R. Anderson sat down with journalist Robert Draper to discuss his new book on one of the most infamous cases of intelligence manipulation in recent history, entitled "To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America into Iraq." They also discussed his recent article for The New York Times Magazine detailing the Trump administration's efforts to change intelligence reports on election interference and what these cases can tell us about the relationship between the presidency and the intelligence community.
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Transcript
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| 0:14.7 | That's patreon.com slash LawFair. |
| 0:18.2 | Also, check out LawFair's other podcast offerings, rational security, chatter, LawFair |
| 0:25.6 | no bull and the aftermath. |
| 0:33.9 | President Bush said publicly and privately many, many times throughout 2002, my mind isn't |
| 0:39.7 | made up. |
| 0:40.7 | Now, I do think that he was leaning very much towards the idea of war, was very inclined |
| 0:45.0 | to depose that on by military force and said that frequently as well. |
| 0:49.4 | But no one really tested here as insistence that his mind wasn't closed on the subject |
| 0:54.5 | that he was willing to hear others speak of this. |
| 0:58.0 | Because they didn't test that they instead built, I guess you could call a wartime apparatus. |
| 1:03.7 | Including interagency meetings that dealt with all these supposed eventualities of war, |
| 1:10.2 | such as a humanitarian crisis, such as Saddam perhaps setting the oil fields aflame. |
| 1:15.2 | All were predicated on the notion that war was going to happen. |
| 1:22.2 | I'm Scott R. Anderson and this is the LawFair podcast for August 18, 2020. |
| 1:28.1 | President Trump's relationship with the intelligence community is back in the news again. |
| 1:32.2 | After allegations that his administration manipulated an intelligence report to show a false equivalency |
| 1:37.3 | between Russian efforts to interfere in the 2020 presidential election on his behalf and |
| 1:41.5 | similar efforts by China and Iran on behalf of his opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden. |
| 1:47.0 | Yet Trump isn't the first president to try and get the intelligence community to align |
| 1:50.7 | its assessments with his preferred version of the facts and he's most likely not the last. |
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