Greetings, friends, neighbors and countrymen! I have been away from my blog for far too long and it's time I took up the keyboard sword again. This is the first installment of what I hope to be a series on the MSM's untruths, half-truths and downright smears of President Elect Donald Trump. I'm not going to waste my time on legitimate criticisms, just distortions and lies. Enjoy, and don't forget to leave a comment!
Once again, the press is playing games to make Trump look bad. The big story today is that he is skipping the majority of daily intelligence briefing meetings. I saw the interview and they are telling you only part of the truth of what he said. Here's the deal:
1.) While there are daily meetings, the daily briefings are written reports. The media knows this, so they have worded their reports to say that Trump isn't "receiving" the daily briefings. He is. What he has been skipping is some of the meetings. HE STILL GETS THE WRITTEN REPORTS.
2.) Trump stated he has been attending meetings himself about twice a week. VPE Pence and Generals Mattis and Kelly, secretaries of Defense and Homeland Security respectively, attend EVERY meeting, even those that Trump attends himself. HE STILL GETS THE WRITTEN REPORTS.
3.) Trump said that very little changes on a daily basis, which is why the daily briefing meetings are redundant. With filling his cabinet as well as a staff of thousands on his plate, attending meetings with redundant information is not something Trump sees an efficient expenditure of his valuable time. Pence and two generals are at every meeting and are instructed to contact him if something major changes, and that Trump is "only a minute away" if he is called into a critical meeting. HE STILL GETS THE WRITTEN REPORTS.
4.) He isn't president yet, and won't be for another 6 weeks. Once his cabinet and top staff positions are filled, he may be more available to attend the meetings. HE STILL GETS THE WRITTEN REPORTS.
5.) Many Presidents, including 0bama, have famously or infamously skipped the meetings. From the Washington Post, Sept. 24, 2012:
"...the president’s daily calendar shows Obama receiving an in-person briefing on the Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) 43.8 percent of his time in office. (The percentage dropped from a high of 48.8 percent in 2010 to 38.2 percent through May of 2012.)"
George W. Bush “wanted personal and oral, and that matched CIA’s institutional interest in face to face with the president, much better for their bureaucratic politics, but unclear how good it was for presidential decision making,” he said. “On Iraq WMD [weapons of mass destruction], the direct brief was clearly pernicious; reading might have pointed to the dissents, but the briefers did not.”
"In contrast, Bill 'Clinton the reader was known to comment that his morning papers were better than the intel brief, and better written — to the point that the CIA director James Woolsey joked that when that Cessna crashed into the White House, that was him seeking an audience with the president.'
"Richard Nixon also had few, if any, oral briefings and instead received his intelligence from the morning memo of his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger."
6.) Ironically, all the present hoopla over whether or not a PE or President must attend the daily briefing meetings, was stirred up in an anti-Obama ad run by American Crossroads, Karl Rove's super-PAC; a good move for Rove, since both Bushes preferred attending the face-to-face meetings to the written briefings, but now backfiring as people apply his misinformation to the current PE.
