CIA publishes new account describing “challenges” of briefing Trump
The U.S. intelligence community faced “greater challenges” in briefing former President Trump than it had confronted in almost five decades, when President-elect Nixon was taking office, according to a new account published by the CIA’s internal research center.
As was well-documented during his time in office, Mr. Trump’s tense relationship with U.S. intelligence agencies worsened amid politically charged investigations into his campaign’s contacts with Russia, leading to a “badly strained” rapport early in his presidency, former CIA officer Robert Helgerson writes in an update to his book, “Getting to Know the President.”
The book is featured among other unclassified materials on the CIA’s “Center for the Study of Intelligence” website, but is for educational purposes and not an official product of the agency or reflective of its position, according to a disclaimer.
It was first published in 1996 and is a running historical account, dating back to the Truman administration, of how the intelligence community briefs newly elected presidents. Its latest chapter includes insights from the senior intelligence officials who oversaw the pre-election briefings offered to the presidential candidates in 2016, as well as briefings during the presidential transition and the delivery of the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) throughout Trump’s presidency.
“For the Intelligence Community, the Trump transition was far and away the most difficult in its historical experience with briefing new presidents,” Helgerson says. “Trump was like Nixon, suspicious and insecure about the intelligence process, but unlike Nixon in the way he reacted. Rather than shut the [intelligence community] out, Trump engaged with it, but attacked it publicly,” he writes.
The director of Central Intelligence during Nixon’s presidency, Richard Helms, talked about the “rocky” relationship between Nixon and the intelligence community in a 1982 interview that is included in the book. Nixon “would constantly…pick on the [CIA] for not having properly judged what the Soviets were going to do with various kinds of weaponry. And obviously, he was being selective, but he would make nasty remarks about this and say this obviously had to be sharpened up.”
Nixon mostly declined to receive the PDB, not because he wasn’t engaged with foreign policy — he instead delegated this to his then-national security adviser Henry Kissinger. Throughout his presidency, according to the book, a courier would deliver the PDB to Kissinger’s office. Kissinger would then send Nixon the PDB “along with material from the State Department, the White House Situation Room, the Joint Chiefs, and others,” and then “Nixon would keep the material on his desk, reading it at his convenience throughout the day.”
The latest installment of the book, a 40-page account, details Mr. Trump’s first ever briefing, which took place in August 2016 at the FBI field office in New York City. Mr. Trump, then still the Republican presidential nominee, was “primarily a listener,” the document says, “reflecting the fact that the material was new to him.” At his second briefing in September,…
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