More Fake News from the Washington Post on President Trump and U.S. Intelligence

According to lengthy front-page December 15 Washington Post story, America’s security is at risk because President Trump refuses to accept the findings of U.S. intelligence agencies on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.  A related allegation that President Trump’s intelligence briefings are playing down or omitting intelligence on this issue has liberal journalists and former intelligence officials claiming that intelligence is being politicized to avoid offending the president.

Based on my 25 years working in and with the U.S. Intelligence Community, I can say without hesitation that this Washington Post story is fake news designed to advance the Left’s teetering Trump-Russia collusion narrative.

The article’s authors – Greg Miller, Greg Jaffe and Philip Rucker – depict a January 6, 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) that Russia meddled in the election – and did so to help Trump win – as “objective reality” and repeatedly assert that Mr. Trump’s refusal to accept this assessment means he is refusing to recognize the threat to U.S. national security posed by Russia.

The truth is that the January ICA is far from objective truth and had serious problems.  I broke the story on Fox News.com last January that this assessment appeared to be rigged to produce a conclusion to hurt Mr. Trump politically because Intelligence Community procedures on drafting this type of analysis were not followed and it reflected the views of only three intelligence agencies, not all 17 as the mainstream media was claiming.  The New York Times was forced to publish a correction on this point last June.

Even worse, as I explained in a May 12, 2017 Fox News.com op-ed, the January ICA on Russian interference in the 2016 election was drafted by a group of about two dozen  “hand-picked” analysts, a major violation of Intelligence Community procedures.

So what did the Washington Post article say about the huge problems with the January ICA?  Nothing.

In addition, the Post article’s allegations of politicization of President Trump’s PDB briefings are extremely misleading.  According to the article, the PDB briefer who sees the president every morning often structures his presentations to avoid upsetting him. The article also claims that analysis about Russia “that may draw Trump’s ire is in some cases included only in the written assessment and not raised orally.”

There is no scandal here.  President Trump’s PDB, a highly classified document about 10 pages long, is not excluding any intelligence on Russia.  The Post article omits that by tradition, PDB briefers brief as little or as much as presidents want.  The article also doesn’t mention that CIA Director Mike Pompeo briefs the president every morning.

A more important omission: the article fails to mention that Presidents Clinton and Obama often would not meet with their PDB briefers at all because they did not like what they had to say.  I wrote about this in 2014.  Marc Thiessen wrote a similar article in 2012.

So in fairness, shouldn’t President Trump be credited for meeting with his PDB briefer every day after President Obama refused to do so?

Miller, Jaffe and Rucker also try to shore up the deteriorating narrative of collusion between President Trump and his advisers with the Russians by claiming the president’s skepticism about intelligence assessments of Russian meddling in the election and Mr. Trump’s interest in establishing a working relationship with Russia represents something nefarious.

Never mind that no evidence whatsoever of such collusion has surfaced despite multiple investigations since mid-2016.  The authors also ignored that the Obama administration sought to establish a working relationship with Russia.  Remember Hillary Clinton’s “Russia Reset?”

I believe President Trump’s reluctance to accept the findings of U.S. intelligence agencies on Russian election meddling is understandable given the major flaws in the January 2017 ICA, as well as the incredible hostility that intelligence officers expressed against him before and after the election.  Current and former intelligence officers have been trying to undermine Mr. Trump since the summer of 2016 by calling him “a traitor,” stating they would refuse to brief him when he was a presidential candidate and leaking details of his intelligence briefings to the press.

I have long believed that this disrespectful and irresponsible behavior severely damaged the relationship between U.S. intelligence agencies and President Trump.  I was stunned when former Deputy CIA Director Michael Morell recently appeared to concede this point.  Morell, who  wrote an August 2016 New York Times op-ed calling Mr. Trump a “threat to our national security,” told Politico’s Susan Glasser earlier this month that he and other intelligence officers failed to think through the consequences of their partisan attacks on Mr. Trump.

While partisan efforts by intelligence officers to undermine Mr. Trump hurt the Intelligence Community’s relationship with him, fortunately CIA Director Mike Pompeo seems to have used his close relationship with the president to reverse this damage.  Not surprisingly, the Washington Post story has no mention of this.

Finally, the Post story misses the boat on President Obama’s decision in late December 2016 to expel Russian diplomats and close two Russian diplomatic compounds to punish Moscow for interfering in the 2016 election.  The article discusses at length how the Trump administration considered lifting these sanctions but fails to discuss how they likely were imposed by the Obama administration to sabotage President Trump’s Russia policy.

President Obama imposed these sanctions on December 29, 2016.  It was an extraordinary for an outgoing president with only 22 days in office to take such dramatic action that was certain to result in retaliation by Russia during the next president’s term and without the president-elect’s consent.  One has to ask why Mr. Obama chose December 29, 2016 to sanction Russia when it had committed many other heinous acts during his presidency such as invading and seizing Crimea and supporting rebels in Ukraine that shot down a Malaysian Air flight in 2014.

Obama’s 11^th hour Russia sanctions were not just an attempt to sabotage the Trump administration’s Russia policy.  They also were a trap to catch Trump officials in a supposed Logan Act violation by discussing these sanctions with Russian officials before Mr. Trump was sworn in.  It is therefore no accident when former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn reportedly fell into this trap when he discussed this issue with Russian Ambassador Kislyak, an NSA transcript of their discussion was illegally leaked to the press and anti-Trump Justice Department official Sally Yates later used this intelligence against Flynn with Trump officials.

It’s too bad that the authors of the Post article did not explore the suspicious nature of President Obama’s last-minute Russia sanctions and how they appear to have been part of a larger strategy by the Obama administration, the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee to abuse the enormous power of U.S. intelligence agencies, the FBI, the Justice Department, and the Office of the President to discredit and defeat a presidential candidate from an opposing political party.

But this is too much to hope for from one of America’s leading Fake News outlets.