Trump likes bite-sized briefings
President wants intelligence chiefs to get to the point with daily updates
US President Donald Trump consumes classified intelligence like he does almost everything else in life: ravenously and impatiently, eager to ingest glinting nuggets but often indifferent to subtleties.
Most mornings, often at 10.30am, sometimes earlier, Trump sits behind the historic Resolute desk and, with a fresh Diet Coke fizzing and papers piled high, receives top-secret updates on the world’s hot spots.
The President interrupts his briefers with questions but also with random asides. He asks that the top brass of the intelligence community be present, and he demands brevity.
As they huddle around the desk, Trump likes to pore over visuals — maps, charts, pictures and videos, as well as “killer graphics”, as CIA Director Mike Pompeo phrased it.
“That’s our task, right? To deliver the material in a way that he can best understand the information we’re trying to communicate,” said Pompeo, adding that he, too, prefers to “get to the core of the issue quickly”.
Yet there are signs that the President may not be retaining all the intelligence he is presented, fully absorbing its nuance, or respecting the sensitivities of the information and how it was gathered.
Earlier this month, for instance, Trump bragged to top Russian diplomats about the quality of the intelligence and revealed highly classified information, related to the fight against Isis (Islamic State), that had been shared by a US partner.
He recently — despite all evidence to the contrary — said that perhaps China, not Russia, had tried to meddle in the 2016 presidential election. And during a meeting in Jerusalem with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week, Trump seemed to effectively confirm that the private information he divulged to the Russian diplomats came from Israel.
“Just so you understand, I never mentioned the word or the name Israel,” Trump told reporters, responding to a question no one had asked. “Never mentioned it during that conversation.”
In March, the President also pressured two of the nation’s top intelligence officials to help him publicly push back against the FBI investigation into possible collusion between the Russian Government and his campaign, a request both men felt was inappropriate.
This portrait of Trump as a consumer of the nation’s secrets is based on interviews with several senior Administration officials who regularly attend his briefings. Some of the interviews were conducted in early May, before the President’s meeting with the Russians.
Intelligence officials were prepared to deliver daily briefings to Trump throughout the transition period, but he often turned them away, usually agreeing to sit for briefings only once or twice per week.
“You know, I’m, like, a smart person. I don’t have to be told the same thing in the same words every single day for the next eight years,” Trump told Fox News last December.
President Barack Obama offered a retort when he later appeared on The Daily Show: “It doesn’t matter how smart you are . . . If you’re not getting their perspective, their detailed perspective, then you are flying blind.”
As President, Trump now takes briefings nearly every day. In a White House with few steadying mechanisms — and one led by a Washington neophyte who bristles at structure and protocol — the daily intelligence briefing is the rare constant.
The sessions often run past their scheduled time, stretching for 30 or 45 minutes, prompting Trump’s chief of staff, Reince Priebus, to pop into the Oval Office to cut off the discussion: “Mr President, we’ve got people backing up outside.”
“A president who I think came into the office thinking he would focus on domestic issues . . . has learned that you inherit the world and its problems when you’re president of the United States,” said Daniel Coats, director of national intelligence and a frequent participant in Trump’s briefings. Yet while Pompeo and Coats praise the intelligenceconsuming habits of the President who appointed them, Trump’s standing among career intelligence officers remains strained.
He has continued to disparage their motives and work — most notably by refusing to accept the consensus of the CIA, the FBI and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that Russia waged an unprecedented effort to disrupt last year’s election.