. Fmr Deputy DNI Says Trump Routinely Expressed Deep Skepticism, Outright Disbelief During Intel Briefings - News Times

Fmr Deputy DNI Says Trump Routinely Expressed Deep Skepticism, Outright Disbelief During Intel Briefings

By News Here - 16:58

President Donald Trump in Oval Office

Photo credit: Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Former Deputy Director of National Intelligence Susan Gordon publicly described what it was like to give intelligence briefings to President Donald Trump, noting how he routinely expressed deep skepticism and often refused to believe the findings.

According to CNN, Gordon made her first public remarks since leaving the Trump White House on Tuesday at a gathering of the Women’s Foreign Policy Group. Gordon abruptly left the administration this past summer when she was passed over for promotion after her former boss, DNI Dan Coats, resigned. Coats had frequently contradicted Trump’s public comments about the national security threats represented by Russia and North Korea.

“I’m not sure I believe that,” Gordon said, quoting a very common response from Trump during her intelligence briefings, which she said took place two or three times a week. She also said he typically asked questions that reflected his background in business and having never served as a public official before: “‘Why is that true? Why are we there? Why is this what you believe? Why do we do that?'”

Gordon said her intelligence meetings with Trump were, at times, “actually kind of a fun brief because he was interactive, he would challenge you.” She did, however, try to understand where Trump’s disbelief came from and what external information he was placing more trust in. “Intelligence is fundamentally a craft of uncertainty and of possibility, so that doesn’t put you off,” Gordon explained. “It’s trying to catch up to how you adjudicate the sources that led him to believe that and how you respond to it.”

In addition, she noted that Trump seemed to view the world through a single economic prism, which did not connect with the highly political and military aspects of most of her intelligence briefings. “We were scrambling a bit to try and produce intelligence that was foundationally useful for someone who is interested in making trades and deals,” she recalled.



from Mediaite https://ift.tt/2OOiWma

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