U.S. intelligence community 'struggled' to brief Trump, CIA study says
CTV
The U.S. intelligence community 'struggled' to brief U.S. President-elect Donald Trump in 2016, achieving 'only limited success' in educating and developing a relationship with the incoming president, according to a newly released unclassified history of the transition period published by the CIA's in-house academic centre.
Although Trump spent substantial time with briefers on a routine basis throughout the transition period, his free-wheeling style and deep mistrust of the intelligence community presented them with "greater challenges" even than U.S. President-elect Richard Nixon, who blamed the CIA for his election loss in 1960 and cut the agency out as president, the history found.
The 40-page narrative — a regular update to a CIA book on briefing presidents-elect written by a retired intelligence officer — offers only a few new details but confirms widely reported press accounts of the former President's approach to intelligence.
It offers an inside window into the intelligence community's struggle to adjust to a president who was "suspicious and insecure about the intelligence process" and, in the words of former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, prone to "fly off on tangents." And it narrates how, at every turn, the relationship between the new President and the intelligence community was undermined by the political imbroglio stemming from the Trump campaign's alleged relationship to Russia.
"Looking back at the Trump transition, one must conclude that the IC achieved only limited success with what had always been its two fundamental goals with the briefing process: to assist the president-elect in becoming familiar with foreign developments and threats affecting U.S. interests with which he would have to deal once in office; and to establish a relationship with the new president and his team in which they understood how they could draw on the Intelligence Community to assist them in discharging their responsibilities," the history recounts.
