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Tuesday, January 17, 2017

Trump v. The Intelligence Community - CIA Director Brennan Speaks Out

Click here for an article by Aaron Blake in The Washington Post entitled "The director of the CIA just went off on Donald Trump. It was a long time coming."

Blake lists the ways in which Trump has dissed the IC (intelligence community):
1. It took Trump until last week to acknowledge that Russia was behind the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta — a long-held conclusion of the intelligence community. Trump had previously suggested that it might have been the Democrats themselves, China, “somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds” or “some guy in his home in New Jersey.”

2. Trump still hasn't acknowledged the intelligence community's conclusion that the effort was intended to benefit his candidacy.

3. In July, he said he hoped Russian hackers had Clinton's emails and urged them to find them if they didn't.

4. In one tweet this month, he claimed that an intelligence briefing he was to receive on Russia's hacking had been delayed, even as the intel community said it had not, and . . .

5. . . . in the same tweet, he questioned whether the intelligence community needed to buy time to “build a case.” He also has called efforts to look into Russian hacking a “political witch hunt.”

6. He has regularly put the word “intelligence” in quotation marks in his tweets.

7. He has suggested at multiple points that the intelligence community may have directly leaked the dossier, even as it is not an intelligence document and was seen by many journalists and lawmakers in Washington before BuzzFeed published it. He said last week that it was leaked by “maybe the intelligence agencies, which would be a tremendous blot on their record if they in fact did that.” Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. pushed back, clarifying that “this document is not a U.S. Intelligence Community product and that I do not believe the leaks came from within the [intelligence community].”

8. Trump and his team have mischaracterized the intelligence committee's report when it comes to whether Russia actually had an effect on the 2016 election. Although the intelligence community has said clearly that it can't and won't make that determination, Trump's team has said it determined there was no impact.

9. Trump has doubted the intelligence community by saying, “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.”

10. He has favorably cited the comments of Julian Assange and Vladimir Putin — who are decidedly not allies of U.S. intelligence — while being much more skeptical about U.S. intelligence.

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