Donald Trump Never Got Another CIA Classified Intelligence Briefing After Jan. 6

After a holiday break where he didn’t receive a classified intelligence briefing, President Donald Trump was supposed to get one on Jan. 6, 2021—the day he incited a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol. It didn’t happen. And then he didn’t get one for the rest of his presidency—and hasn’t received one since.

That unusual stretch where the sitting president didn’t receive a regular classified briefing is recounted in the latest version of a book published and regularly revised by the Central Intelligence Agency, which describes how spies update presidents on national security matters.

The situation in the waning days of Trump’s presidency was so uncommon that it actually caused concern among some administration officials that Trump was losing touch with reality, as he was getting unhinged advice on domestic issues from Justice Department attorneys and outside counsel that openly advocated rejecting election results.

“There was no certainty that he was getting objective, unbiased information in any other way,” one source familiar with the matter told The Daily Beast. “You couldn’t trust that anybody around him was able to get that information to him in that period of time.”

Unlike past presidents—who would read their daily intelligence report and occasionally get briefed by a CIA officer—Trump regularly refused to read the text, demanded “killer” pictures, and preferred to get updated in person by his daily briefer.

While past presidents took great interest in having the most up-to-date information on security challenges and foreign intelligence, the CIA book that was updated last month revealed that Trump spent two days a week receiving the latest sensitive information coming in from American spies all over the globe, in sessions running 45 minutes on average.

That came to a halt in late 2020, however, according to the CIA’s “Getting to Know the President” book, written by a revered former inspector general at the agency, John Helgerson.

Trump took a vacation break over the holidays when he traveled to Mar-a-Lago and told his briefer “he would see her later,” Helgerson wrote. The president then went two weeks without that pivotal one-on-one update, unlike his predecessor, former President Barack Obama, who was known to read the daily report even while vacationing in Hawaii.

During that break, Trump and his closest advisors kept busy trying to overturn election results in Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin by peddling disinformation and supporting conspiracy-laden legal challenges that eventually went bust. There was his infamous phone call demanding that Georgia’s top elections official “find 11,780 votes,” not to mention his despotic attempt to get the U.S. Supreme Court to declare Wisconsin’s election “unconstitutional.”

The White House finally scheduled a briefing when he’d be back in the nation’s capital. Trump was apparently too busy that day—spending Jan. 6 inciting a riot by delivering a speech and calling on his acolytes to “fight like hell” and march on the Capitol building just as Congress was certifying the 2020 election results.

The CIA book says, “the briefings were…