Donald Trump Did Not Get Another CIA Classified Intelligence Briefing After Jan. 6

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After a holiday break where he did not receive a classified intelligence briefing, President Donald Trump should have gotten one in January. 6, 2021 on the day he instigated a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol. It did not happen. And then he didn’t get one for the rest of his presidency.

That unusual stretch for which the president did not receive a regular classified briefing is narrated in the latest version of a book published and regularly revised by the Central Intelligence Agency, which describes how spies update the president on national security matters.

The situation in the declining days of the Trumps presidency is so rare that it has actually caused concern among some administration officials that Trump is already losing touch with reality, as he is getting relentless advice from local issues from Justice Department attorneys and outside attorneys openly advocating election denial. result.

“There’s no guarantee he’s getting objective, unbiased information in any other way, a source familiar with the matter told The Daily Beast. You can’t trust that anyone around him got that information from him at the time.” that. “

Unlike previous presidents who read their daily intelligence report and occasionally get a briefing by a CIA official, Trump regularly refuses to read the text, asking for killer photos. , and prefers to be updated personally by his daily briefer.

While previous presidents have taken great interest in having the latest information on security and foreign intelligence challenges, the CIA book updated last month revealed that Trump spends two days a week receiving latest sensitive information coming from all American spies. worldwide, with sessions running an average of 45 minutes.

That stopped in late 2020, however, according to the CIA’s Getting to Know the President book, written by a respected former inspector general at the agency, John Helgerson.

Trump was on vacation during the holidays when he traveled to Mar-a-Lago and told his briefer that he would see him later, Helgerson wrote. The president then went two weeks without an important one-on-one update, unlike his predecessor, former President Barack Obama, who was known to read the daily report even while on vacation in Hawaii.

At the time, Trump and his closest advisers were busy trying to reverse election results in Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin by selling disinformation and supporting legal challenges full of conspiracy that eventually damaged. There was his infamous phone call requesting that Georgia’s top election official get 11,780 votes, not to mention his despotic attempt to have the U.S. Supreme Court declare the Wisconsin election unconstitutional.

The White House has finally scheduled a briefing when he returns to the nation’s capital. Trump seems too busy stirring up chaos by giving a speech and calling on his acolytes to fight like hell and march to the Capitol building as Congress validates the results of the 2020 election.

The CIA book says the briefings will continue on Jan. 6 but nothing is scheduled after the attack on the Capitol.

The break for the holidays and the two -week stretch after the insurrection means Trump has been absent from briefings for most of his last month in office, a halt that experts have found unprecedented.

It’s not unusual to miss one here or there. But it’s not uncommon to go weeks without a briefing, says Matthew Kroenig, a former intelligence official who developed strategies to counter China, Iran, North Korea, Russia, and terrorist networks.

Whether you like him or not, he is the commander in chief. As a nation, we would have been safer if he could have taken those briefings, said Kroenig, who is now deputy director of the nonprofit Atlantic Councils Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.

When asked by The Daily Beast, the CIA would not answer why Trump stopped receiving briefings at the time. Three former intelligence officials said the scheduling of briefings was at the White House, which has been busy the past two weeks fighting accusations of a coup attempt and preparing for an impeachment fight.

Nor will the CIA say whether Trump has received them since he left office, although President Joe Biden recorded in February saying his predecessor should no longer accept them.

Trumps post-presidential office did not respond to questions Monday night.

Helgerson, a career spy who has retired and was contracted to write the book, declined to provide further details on the abrupt halt in briefings to The Daily Beast on Monday, citing strict limits imposed by the agency.

The CIA books also describe the new chapter in exactly how Trump posed a challenge for the countries ’intelligence officials, especially at the beginning of his presidency, when he was immersed in accusations of dubious ties with Russia and criticized against the surveillance networks of countries.

Given how complicated the world is today, and given the kinds of decisions the president must involve in the arena of national security, I would worry that the president may be behind the curve.

Larry Pfeiffer, former CIA chief of staff

For the Intelligence Community, Trump’s move is far and away the hardest in its historical experience in briefing new presidents, the book says. Instead of closing the IC, Trump contacted it, but attacked it publicly.

A subsequent section quoted Obama’s outgoing director of national intelligence, James Clapper, as saying that Trump is absurd and easily flies on tangents; there may be eight or nine minutes of real intelligence in an hour’s discussion.

Some national security experts have pointed out that, while Trump stopped receiving classified updates, many around him still received them. As Helgerson mentioned in his revised edition of the book, Vice President Mike Pence was then an industrious, six -day -a -week Reader who often accompanied the president on his brief and sparked thoughtful discussion about important matters. And again, at the end of his presidency Trump killed Pence and intimately relied on Fox News and Newsmax hosts for a steady flow of unverified information.

Larry Pfeiffer, a former CIA chief of staff who also ran the White Houses Situation Room during the Obama administration, stressed that informing the president in the last weeks of his tenure would be important. He said a month stretch without a briefing was the most troubling detail in the latest update of the books.

Given how complicated the world is today, and because of the kinds of decisions the president must be involved in the arena of national security, I am concerned that the president may be behind the curve, he said.

Iran may have planned some insane attacks, or you may have intel members of the incoming administration acting against current U.S. foreign policy, he said, joking about the problems plaguing Trump’s own transition team in 2016.

Shannon Vavra contributed reporting.

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