Trump and His Intelligence Briefings with David Priess
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 1 December 2021
⏱️ 56 minutes
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Summary
The CIA has opened a window into former president Donald Trump's always interesting and frequently contentious relationship with the intelligence community. A newly published history confirms a lot of what we already knew about Trump's preferences—like that he didn't actually read his daily top secret briefing—but it also shows Trump as privately more appreciative of career intelligence professionals than his public broadsides against their deep-state bosses might suggest.
Shane Harris sat down with Lawfare’s David Priess, the man who wrote the book about the President's Daily Brief, to chew over a new chapter in the “Getting to Know the President” series by John L. Helgerson, a retired CIA officer and former inspector general. The understated title, “Donald J. Trump—A Unique Challenge,” gives you a hint that as with all things Trump, his relationship to the intelligence community was anything but business as usual.
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Transcript
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| 0:25.6 | no bull and the aftermath. |
| 0:33.9 | The issue that started to come out probably in the campaign but certainly in the transition |
| 0:39.3 | was the fact that it sure looked like a lot of Trump's questions and pushback weren't |
| 0:45.4 | that. |
| 0:46.4 | It wasn't weighing the relative evidence. |
| 0:48.1 | It wasn't trying to figure out if an alternative explanation had more support in the intelligence. |
| 0:53.6 | Jim Clapper came right out and said it. |
| 0:56.5 | He said that he thought the challenge with Trump was that he was fact free, that evidence |
| 1:01.9 | in his words doesn't cut it with him. |
| 1:05.1 | That's a different kind of challenge. |
| 1:06.7 | That's not a customer who's engaging the analysts and making sure that they've supported |
| 1:11.2 | their argument with good sources and good argumentation. |
| 1:14.7 | That's somebody who doesn't care what the facts are and just disagrees with the conclusion |
| 1:19.2 | so he's going to dismiss the evidence. |
| 1:21.3 | I think that's where a lot of the trouble came from. |
| 1:24.2 | I'm Shane Harris and this is the LawFair podcast December 1st, 2021. |
| 1:30.3 | The CIA has opened a window into former President Donald Trump's always interesting and frequently |
| 1:35.7 | contentious relationship with the intelligence community. |
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