President-elect Donald Trump, who has publicly questioned the trustworthiness of America’s intelligence community, got another chance to be convinced Tuesday after receiving his first President’s Daily Brief. This is the top-secret information about the biggest national-security concerns that President Obama gets everyday; as the next commander-in-chief, Trump is now privy to the daily briefing, too.
Trump reportedly got the intelligence rundown this afternoon in Trump Tower in Manhattan. Vice-President-elect Mike Pence will also get his highly classified briefing Wednesday in Washington, D.C., reports CNN.
Trump received two confidential briefings as a presidential candidate, but caused friction with the intelligence community by contradicting its conclusions about Russia’s role in the DNC and other hacks and deriding the nation’s military leaders over the Mosul strategy and for politicizing his briefings by claiming officials’ “body language” revealed they were “unhappy” with Obama.
But Trump will now likely be getting these briefs daily through Inauguration Day and for the next four years. President George W. Bush granted this privilege to Obama during the presidential transition in 2008. At one intelligence briefing in Chicago, Obama reportedly quipped: “It’s good that there are bars on the windows here because if there weren’t, I might be jumping out.”
