Lack of intelligence: Don shuns briefings
Prez takes few intelligence briefings, sked shows
President Trump has an abysmal attendance record when it comes to intelligence briefings.
Over the course of his first year-and-a-half in office, the current commander-inchief has made a habit out of skipping daily intelligence briefings, according to his public schedule.
The meetings provide Presidents with a chance to confer with intelligence officials about threats and other international developments. Trump on Friday attended the sit-down for only the third time this month.
The President's aversion to interacting with his intel chiefs comes as little surprise, given his public rebuke of the U.S. intelligence community assessment of Russian election meddling and previous reports about his disdain for enduring detailed discussions.
A Daily News analysis of Trump's schedule shows that he rarely meets with intelligence officials to go over their assessments.
The President has sat for only 172 such briefings during his first 546 days in the White House, putting his attendance rate at only 31.5%.
That statistic was reached using the same methodology used by the Government Accountability Institute — a right-wing group founded by former Trump adviser Stephen Bannon — to hammer President Barack Obama in a 2013 report.
The conservative think tank blasted Obama over his apparent lack of intel briefings.
During his first 1,225 days in office, the previous President was present at 536 daily intelligence meetings — an attendance record of 43.8%, according to GAI.
The group did not respond to requests for comment about whether they would be analyzing or highlighting Trump's paltry attendance record.
Former Central Intelligence Agency briefer David Priess believes GAI's methodology is misleading.
“I take these numbers with a grain of salt,” Priess, the author of “The President's Book of Secrets: The Untold Story of Intelligence Briefings to America's Presidents from Kennedy to Obama,” told The News. “I thought then and think now that those numbers are off.”
The Bannon-formed group, which receives most of its funding from conservative billionaires Robert and Rebekah Mercer, included Sundays in its Obama analysis. However, Presidents don't even receive paper briefs on Sundays, Priess noted.
Trump was one of Obama's biggest critics when it came to intelligence briefings. The then-reality TV star tweeted in September 2014 that Obama "does not read his intelligence briefings..." and mocked him as “too busy I guess!”
He twisted the report's already dubious claims by conflating Obama's number of in-person briefings and the President's Daily Brief, a highly classified document detailing the intelligence community's latest information about world matters.
Every President since John F. Kennedy has received the PDB in one form or another.
Obama viewed the document on a secure iPad and often asked for detailed analysis of current events.
Presidents Gerald Ford, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush all asked for daily briefings in addition to the document.
Insiders have wondered openly if Trump even reads the brief. As President-elect, the erstwhile real estate magnate implied that he was too intelligent to require a daily rundown of world affairs.
An internal memo reviewed last February by Mother Jones revealed that top intelligence agents have been instructed to keep the written brief brief as well.
The memo notes that the commander-in-chief's daily briefing book typically “contains reports on only three topics, typically no more than one page each.”
Priess noted that there are several other ways that the President can gather knowledge about international affairs and said that the official schedule may not reflect all of Trump's daily interactions with intelligence officials.
“It appears he's still taking some of those face-toface meetings,” Priess said.
He also cautioned that “we don't know if he's reading the daily brief on the days he's not meeting.”
Trump officials defended the commander-in-chief's responsiveness to intel.
“The President receives daily updates and regular briefings from his national security team,” a spokesperson for the National Security Council told The News.
However, Trump's team has been forced to take a unique approach to the tradition, presenting the President with graphs, charts, maps and limiting information to bullet points, according to officials.
“He likes it orally,” Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats said Thursday during a discussion about Trump at the Aspen Security Forum. “He likes examples ... We use models. We use charts. We use a number of things.”
Coats added that the briefings “are relatively regular based on the President's travel.”
The number of daily briefings on Trump's public schedule have nosedived in recent months, with only 31 listed from March through June compared with 56 over the same period of time during his first year in the White House.
The drop off coincides with an uptick in travel — and the addition of John Bolton, the hard-line Fox News analyst and former American ambassador to the United Nations, who replaced Gen. H.R. McMaster as national security adviser.
Still, the numbers are meager when compared to those of Obama.
From March through June of his first year, Obama attended 71 intelligence briefings. In his second year in office, 57 such meetings were listed on his schedule.