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Off the bat, you should know that this story comes from CNN—and because it’s CNN, the headline is designed to inflame passions against Donald Trump, because as James O’Keefe has revealed, that network’s raison d’être amounts to little more than a personal vendetta against the President. That said, the story itself isn’t as incendiary as all that, and demonstrates—perhaps unintentionally—that Trump’s skepticism about what he’s told is a healthy thing, rather than the paranoia and intellectual vacuousness that Jeff Zucker’s minions would have their audience believe.
At any rate, you can judge for yourself:
Former official says Trump often refused to believe his intelligence briefings
One of President Donald Trump’s most common responses to intelligence briefings is to doubt what he’s being told, former Deputy Director of Intelligence Susan Gordon said Tuesday.
Gordon, an intelligence veteran of more than 30 years, said Monday that Trump had two typical responses to briefings.
“One, ‘I don’t think that’s true,'” Gordon told the Women’s Foreign Policy Group.
“The one is ‘I’m not sure I believe that,'” Gordon continued, “and the other is the second order and third order effects. ‘Why is that true? Why are we there? Why is this what you believe? Why do we do that?’ Those sorts of things.”
Mind you, Trump is approaching the world of intelligence from a different perspective. For one thing, he’s not a politician. The presidency is his first elected office, and because of that he hasn’t spent decades getting to know his way around Washington and assembling the kind of political allies that most people already have in place when they run for the highest office in the land. On the other hand, Trump has collected his fair share of enemies—the vast majority of them Swamp dwellers who are scared to death of the way he’s been shaking things up, and even more scared of the threat he poses to how business is done inside the Beltway.
Which brings us to the real elephant in the room, a subject that Gordon did not discuss: the role of the intelligence community played in trying to take down Trump. It was James Comey’s FBI that got the ball rolling on the Russia collusion hoax, laundering the Clinton campaign’s oppo research in the form of the Steele Dossier through the Department of Justice in order to get FISA warrants to spy on Trump campaign officials. It was former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper who leaked the news of Comey briefing Trump on the dossier to CNN, setting into motion the chain of events that led to the Mueller investigation. And it was Eric Ciarmella, formerly of the National Security Council and now working as a CIA analyst, who started the current impeachment imbroglio when he went outside his chain of command to tell Adam Schiff about Trump’s now infamous call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. No matter where Donald Trump finds a hostile move against his administration, the intelligence community seems to be in the middle of it.
Is it any wonder he treats everything they say with skepticism?
The article goes on to note how Trump tends to approach intelligence matters from an economic perspective, prioritizing those things that benefit America—in other words, doing what he promised to do as President. Gordon even has some praise for him, saying that Trump was “actually kind of a fun brief because he was interactive, he would challenge you.” How CNN thought this would somehow cast Trump in a poor light is a bit of a mystery. I can only assume that they thought most of their readers wouldn’t make it past the headline—par for the course in outrage culture, I guess.
As to the larger implications of this story, however, a terrible danger remains. By now, it’s obvious that the intelligence community has thoroughly wrecked its relationship with the chief executive, making it more difficult for him to make important decisions that directly affect national security and the safety of all Americans. As it’s unlikely that the career bureaucrats who think they know best will change their ways, it will be up to President Trump to see that there is a reckoning.
We are currently forming the American Conservative Movement. If you are interested in learning more, we will be sending out information in a few weeks.
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