The question on everyone’s mind these days is how is it that the Intel community and his briefers didn’t tell Trump that the Russia was paying bounties to the Taliban for the death of U.S. soldiers?
The information was in his Presidential Daily Brief, John Bolton was aware of this piece of intel last year, [and allegedly briefed him on it] but somehow it just never came up since then?
Well, the answer is simple. They didn’t tell him because they couldn’t tell him, and they couldn’t tell him because he wouldn’t listen as was reported by Time last year.
In the wake of President Donald Trump’s renewed attacks on the U.S. intelligence community this week, senior intelligence briefers are breaking two years of silence to warn that the President is endangering American security with what they say is a stubborn disregard for their assessments.
Citing multiple in-person episodes, these intelligence officials say Trump displays what one called “willful ignorance” when presented with analyses generated by America’s $81 billion-a-year intelligence services. The officials, who include analysts who prepare Trump’s briefs and the briefers themselves, describe futile attempts to keep his attention by using visual aids, confining some briefing points to two or three sentences, and repeating his name and title as frequently as possible.
What is most troubling, say these officials and others in government and on Capitol Hill who have been briefed on the episodes, are Trump’s angry reactions when he is given information that contradicts positions he has taken or beliefs he holds. Two intelligence officers even reported that they have been warned to avoid giving the President intelligence assessments that contradict stances he has taken in public.
Donald Trump is decidedly pro-Russia. Telling him that Russia is paying the Taliban to kill our soldiers in Afghanistan was never gonna happen. Never.
Continued:
That reaction was on display this week. At a Congressional hearing on national security threats, the leaders of all the major intelligence agencies, including the Directors of National Intelligence, the CIA and the FBI contradicted Trump on issues relating to North Korea, Russia, the Islamic State, and Iran. In response, Trump said the intelligence chiefs were “passive and naïve” and suggested they “should go back to school.”
[...]
But the disconnect between Trump and his intelligence briefers is no joke, the officials say. Several pointed to concerns regarding Trump’s assessment of the threat posed by North Korea’s nuclear capabilities. After Trump’s summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un last summer, the North claimed to have destroyed its major underground nuclear testing facility at Punggye-ri, and Trump has gone out of his way to credit the claim.
The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), which oversees the spy satellites that map and photograph key areas, had tried to impress upon Trump the size and complexity of the North Korean site. In preparing one briefing for the President on the issue early in his administration, the NGA built a model of the facility with a removable roof, according to two officials. To help Trump grasp the size of the facility, the NGA briefers built a miniature version New York’s Statue of Liberty to scale and put it inside the model.
[...]
For now, the briefers are heartened by the intelligence community leaders who risked Trump’s ire by contradicting him in public testimony this week.
The danger, one former intelligence official said, is that those leaders and other intelligence briefers may eventually stop taking such risks in laying out the facts for the President.
That appears to be exactly what happened.
Look at how he reacted to the news
“Possibly another fabricated Russia Hoax”!!
He hasn’t accepted that the GRU and FSB hacked the DNC email server, he still thinks Ukraine did it. Or that they hacked themselves. He hasn’t accepted all of the active measures they used to get him elected. He’s not going to accept that they are paying money to kill our troops.
Vlad would deny it. Hell, Russian state media is already denying it.
The New York Times is doubling down on claims that Russia offered bounties for the killing of US troops in Afghanistan, but now says local criminals and not the Taliban were the recipients, again offering no actual evidence.
The new article, published Tuesday, says that “electronic data showing large financial transfers from a bank account controlled by Russia’s military intelligence agency to a Taliban-linked account” was intercepted by US spies and “bolsters suspicions” that Russia offered bounties to militants – as claimed by the Times last week
[...]
Most mainstream US media outlets and the Democrats have taken the original New York Times reporting at face value, denouncing Trump as “Putin’s puppet” and a traitor for allegedly not doing anything to “punish Russia” based on the purported intelligence assessments, rather than demanding to see evidence there was anything to it.
.
Apparently, for a “unconfirmed story”, the Pentagon was taking this pretty seriously.
Appearing on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” longtime political columnist David Ignatius said that his own follow-up on the New York Times’ explosive report that Donald Trump’s administration was well aware that the Russians were offering a bounty for the death of U.S. military members revealed that Pentagon officials have been “pounding on the door” and trying to get Donald Trump to do something about it.
“Based on my reporting trying to confirm the New York Times’ excellent story it’s clear in late March you had senior U.S commanders, senior civilian intelligence officials, in effect pounding on the door of the White House saying we need to do something about this, we need to come to a conclusion about what damage the Russian program is doing, we need to reassess our programs in Afghanistan and they couldn’t get an answer,” he reported. “To this day there’s not an answer, there’s not a real response. Was this because the president was briefed and did nothing or because he wasn’t briefed because people were afraid to give him bad news and kept it to themselves? I don’t know.”
They were left pounding on the door because Trump was never going to open it. To this day he hasn’t explained when he was briefed on this information or what he’s going to do about it. The answer is he’ll do nothing, because the story “isn’t confirmed” or maybe it’s a “hoax.”
He’s not turning against Vlad. Not a chance.
Thursday, Jul 2, 2020 · 12:50:33 AM +00:00 · Frank Vyan Walton
Well, it looks like I was right.
As the White House denies Trump was briefed about
Russia placing bounties on US soldiers in Afghanistan, which CNN has confirmed was included in the written PDB this spring, the question of what the President knew and when has moved to center stage. And it brings Trump's aversion to hearing negative analysis about Russia into renewed focus.
In response, his briefers -- who must make difficult judgment calls every day on which intelligence to highlight to the President -- reduced the amount of Russian-related intelligence they included in his oral briefings, instead often placing it only in his written briefing book, a document that is provided daily and sometimes extended to several dozen pages containing the intelligence community's most important information.
But his briefers discovered over time that he often did not read the briefing book, leaving him unaware of crucial intelligence, including threats related to Russia and other parts of the world.