Who Needs Career Intelligence Officials When You Have Fox News?

[babylonsister]

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-intel-officials-786414/

January 30, 2019 1:16PM ET
Who Needs Career Intelligence Officials When You Have Fox News?
The president bashed the intelligence community on Twitter, questioning their assessments of Iran, ISIS and North Korea
Ryan Bort


Concerned as its agencies are with finding facts, President Trump has made sure to keep his distance from the United States intelligence community since taking office. Despite their wealth of expertise, he’s been reluctant to consider their security assessments as any more credible than what he happens to hear on Fox & Friends every morning. It isn’t hard to understand why, and it goes beyond Fox’s use of colorful graphics. The former presents the president with hard truths about dangers facing the nation that he is duty-bound to confront; the latter tells him that all is well — or, if it’s not, that it’s someone else’s fault — and that he’s doing a great job.

On Tuesday, the nation’s top intelligence officials briefed Congress on of North Korea, Iran and ISIS — all issues on which Trump has claimed varying degrees of victory. Their assessments didn’t exactly jibe with what the president would like to believe. Trump responded by attacking the intelligence community, tweeting on Wednesday that its officials are “extremely passive,” “naive” and “wrong,” particularly regarding their assessment of Iran. According to National Intelligence Director Dan Coats, whose warnings about Russian interference in America’s elections Trump has essentially ignored, Iran is still complying with the Obama administration’s nuclear deal, which Trump dramatically abandoned in May. “We do not believe Iran is currently undertaking activities we judge necessary to produce a nuclear device,” said Coats.

snip//

Link to tweet

The reason Coats and the rest of the intelligence community are second-guessing the president is because the president has absolutely no clue what he’s talking about. Unfortunately for America, Fox News will always be there to insist to him that he does.

[Turbineguy]

1. We need Intelligence People

because we have Fox News.