Congressman Will Hurd (R-TX) expressed dismay and frustration at the news that the purported Russia-Taliban bounty killings program was included in the Presidential Daily Brief months ago but was never verbally briefed to President Donald Trump.

Speaking with CNN’s Erin Burnett, Hurd reacted a breaking news report from that network’s Pentagon correspondent, Barbara Starr, that intelligence officials failed to orally discuss the bounty killings program with Trump, even though it was added to the PDB book that is circulated to all top cabinet officials, including the president. It’s well known that Trump skips out on reading the PDB and instead prefers to a short verbal summary of its highlights.

“So you understand this in a way that pretty much no one else does,” Burnett noted to Hurd, who was a former undercover CIA agent. “You heard Barbara’s reporting. It was in the president’s daily brief, he may not have been audibly briefed about it, but it was there for him to read. What is your response?”

“I think your reporter had it right. Why wasn’t it escalated to an in-person brief versus just a physical document?” Hurd asked. “I can’t confirm or deny whether it was in the PDB, but this would be information that should get escalated to the senior levels of government and even if there was some kind of question about intelligence, like something like this, then you would still, you know, put caveats around the information.”

“They’re not our allies, they’re our adversaries and we should be doing everything we can to stop them,” Hurd added, alluding to the Russians. “This is important that the timing of this kind of information is why we’re trying to negotiate a peace process. And can you trust a peace process, people supposed to be involved in supporting the peace process if you know this type of stuff is happening? And guess what the Russians have done this kind of stuff before. We know all the cases of what they have tried to do in Europe. But unfortunately what is happening right now is that the Russians are winning because now we’re continuing to sow mistrust and lack of trust in all our institutions and the questions around this.”

“Again, if it’s in the presidential daily briefing, I’m going to say in my view, if it’s handed to you and you choose not to read it, that’s still on you. I understand he did not get verbally briefed,” Burnett responded, alluding to Trump’s angry dismissal of the corroborated report as “fake news” in a tweet on Sunday. “What do you say to that, that his response isn’t ‘I want to know what the heck happened, I want to know why I wasn’t briefed, and I want to do something about it,’ but instead is to be yelling about fabricated hoaxes and fake news?”

“I’m not going to confirm or deny intelligence, but if something this sensitive was out there, I would be pissed that nobody brought it to me or didn’t raise their hand and be, like, ‘Hey, boss, read in that, there is some information you need to read today, make sure we cut out time in your calendar in order to do that,'” Hurd responded, before listing a number of points that the White House should have been seeking to address in the past few months. “So these are the kinds of questions we should be asking to make sure that our men and women that are serving, in order to make sure we don’t have Al Qaeda coming back, that we don’t have ISIS plotting and planning threats on our homeland, why this is important to bring civility to Afghanistan, in the middle of an alleged peace process, these are some of the questions that we should be getting answers to. And it shouldn’t take months to try to figure out answers to those questions if there is months gone by between collecting this information and having debates around it.”

Watch the video above, via CNN.

from Mediaite https://ift.tt/3g5GaPa