President-elect Donald Trump Wednesday lashed out in a press conference at reports overnight that U.S. intelligence agencies had given him, President Barack Obama, and leaders of House and Senate intelligence committees a highly classified two-page report indicating Russia has compromising and salacious personal and financial information on him.
U.S. agencies, including the FBI, are still investigating the allegations, presented to Trump and Obama by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, FBI Director James Comey, CIA Director John Brennan, and NSA Director Mike Rogers as an addendum to last week’s report on Russian hacking of the election.
The information came from political opposition research done by an organization led by a former British intelligence official. The information is said to include allegations of contacts between Trump personnel and Russian officials during last year’s presidential campaign.
Trump rejected the reports in a tweet as fake and a “witch hunt” and Russia dismissed the report as an “absolute fantasy.” In another tweet Trump said: “Intelligence agencies should never have allowed this fake news to ‘leak’ into the public. One last shot at me. Are we living in Nazi Germany?”
He then slammed the reports during his press conference, calling the information “phony stuff” and told reporters it had been obtained “by opponents of ours, as you know, because you reported it and so did many of the other people.”
“It was a group of opponents that got together — sick people — and they put that crap together,” he said.
Trump conceded that he thought Russia was behind the election hack, although he said “it could have been others also.”
He also defended Russian President Vladimir Putin’s apparent support for him.
“If Putin likes Donald Trump, guess what, folks? That's called an asset, not a liability,” he said.
He added he hopes to get along with Putin, but that there is a “good chance” he will not.
“And if I don't, do you honestly believe that [former Secretary of State and Democratic presidential nominee] Hillary [Cliinton] would be tougher on Putin than me? Does anybody in this room really believe that? Give me a break.”
When asked about his tweet referring to Nazis, he said it was “disgraceful” that intelligence agencies let out any information that “turned out to be so false and fake,” adding, “that's something that Nazi Germany would have done and did do.”
On future relations with Moscow, Trump said Russia would “have much greater respect for our country when I'm leading than when other people have led it.”
“You will see that. Russia will respect our country more.” he said.
The Cipher Brief’s Steve Hirsch Wednesday spoke with David Priess, former CIA intelligence officer and presidential briefer, and author of the recent history of the President’s Daily Brief (PDB), “The President’s Book of Secrets,” about this unusual intelligence briefing and how such information is handled in the Intelligence Community.
The Cipher Brief: Is it unusual to include this sort of information in a briefing for a President?
David Priess: Information specifically about the briefing customer sometimes comes up. I don’t care if it’s the President or another senior policy-making customer: What foreign leaders are saying (or what is circulating) about them is relevant to them doing their job, so it is a legitimate thing to bring up. But it is a difficult thing to bring up, because it can be very uncomfortable or sensitive.
I’ll give you one example. Vice President Al Gore’s daily intelligence briefer told me that she recalled giving Gore a classified report about a foreign government official whom the vice president had developed close ties to. The information that she passed him in the briefing showed that this supposedly friendly official had in fact been fomenting domestic disturbances during events that Gore spoke at. That can be a difficult thing to hear, but Gore was appreciative of it.
Information that directly confronts a policymaker’s world view or their own conclusions can be an "uncomfortable truth," as (former CIA Director) Michael Hayden has said. That can be a difficult conversation, but that’s the job of the intelligence briefer, to bring the information that is relevant to that person.
TCB: What about information like this that doesn’t come from an intelligence agency but comes from, in this case, it was political opposition research that came from a former British intelligence officer. Is that a fairly unusual source for information?
DP: Intelligence analysts in general, and briefers specifically, include information from all relevant sources. They can be vetted reports from the CIA’s spies, they can be intercepted communications, it can be open-source material. Or in this case, something that crosses those lines. If it’s information that is relevant, it is appropriate for briefing. However, a good intelligence analyst and a good intelligence briefer also puts that information into context, not accepting anything at face value, but explaining why this bit of information is relevant or not.
It may be that the relevance of this information is not about its content specifically, but the very fact that it is out there circulating, and people know about it or are reacting to it, makes it a worthwhile topic to make a customer aware of.
TCB: Is that what you think happened in this case?
DP: I don’t know in this case, I have too little information to make a judgement.
TCB: Is outside information like this handled in a specifically different way than other information or not?
DP: All raw intelligence information – and, in that, I will include data from open sources—is treated with skepticism by intelligence analysts and briefers. Information that has gone through a process like an intelligence agency’s internal vetting often checks the reliability of that information. Something that has not been vetted through a process like that naturally warrants more skepticism.
TCB: When you have information like this that’s from another national intelligence agency or from a trusted source – and I gather that this is a trusted source of some sort – do analysts try to confirm all the details?
DP: Well, let me answer it this way. In assessing whether information is worthwhile to include in an assessment, or to present to a customer, you’re looking at the reliability and the quality of the sourcing. Reliability is a factor that is based on whether previous information from that source has been corroborated before; is there a reliable track record of reporting? And then it’s based on the information itself – regardless of the reliability of the source, does the information itself check out?
That is why there is a process for vetting information. I don’t know if that is going on here – I assume it is at some level—but I don’t know the details of that. That is what professional intelligence organizations do.
TCB: Trump said at his news conference that this was leaked. This was apparently only briefed to President-elect Trump, President Obama and congressional intelligence leadership. How many people in your mind would actually have access to this information and was it “leaked”?
DP: I can’t answer that. But based on the description you’ve given me of how few people it was briefed to, that is the kind of thing that is compartmented, even within an intelligence agency, that is, it is not something that would be passed around to everybody with a security clearance. It would probably be held back to a very small subset of people working directly on that issue. That makes leaks both much less likely and much easier to chase down if they occur.
TCB: How many people would you say had access to this within the intelligence community?
DP: Impossible to say.
TCB: This information has not been confirmed according to reports. Why would it be included in a briefing if it hadn’t been confirmed?
DP: If an intelligence briefing only included information that had been confirmed, there would be very few intelligence briefings, and the ones that went forward would not last very long. Intelligence, by its very nature, deals with the unknown and the uncertain. Waiting for confirmation of every potential input before making an assessment would paralyze the intelligence community and render analysis obsolete.
TCB: Is it a reasonable notion that there might be political reasons for including this information?
DP: I don’t have insight on that. From the research I did – from the presidents and vice presidents, from the former CIA directors and intelligence briefers across the decades – the primary consideration for what to include in a briefing on any given day is: What does the customer need to know? What would help inform them about a situation that they have to make a decision about, or let them know something important that they would not know otherwise?
TCB: Is there a certain level of confidence that factors in whether to include something in this kind of briefing packet?
DP: In general, confirmation is a very high bar. The opposite end of the spectrum is also avoided; briefing raw information upon which there has been no assessment of reliability and quality is rarely done. However, the job of the intelligence analyst crafting the assessment – and the job of any briefer delivering it, whether it’s a working level briefer or the director of an agency – is to communicate what is known, what is not known, and what is assessed, as clearly as possible.
In this case, if it is information that is either being vetted or has been vetted with no results yet, then the job of the briefer is to communicate that fact as clearly as possible.
TCB: What form does this information actually go to the President?
DP: It has varied by president, and it varies in some cases even by day. Usually there is a printed President’s Daily Brief, which includes the most secret information the President needs to know. Some presidents have preferred to have discussions with their intelligence briefers. Those may start with the printed document but also venture into areas that are not on the page.
So it really depends on the customer’s style. Reports have suggested that Donald Trump prefers to talk through issues rather than read long documents, which might suggest handling things in conversation rather than in print. However, over the long course of intelligence support to the President and to other top-tier policy customers, it's been a combination of the printed book and oral comments.
TCB: Do you have any thoughts on how this particular one might have been presented to the President? I gather you were talking about the daily briefing.
DP: Everything I heard from those I interviewed for my book—senior intelligence officials as well as presidents and others from the past—suggests that this would have been handled with the utmost care and discretion because of the very nature of the allegations. This is not something that any professional intelligence officer or any leader of an intelligence organization would handle casually or lightly.
TCB: Would the intelligence community try to verify the details after this or would it depend on how the President responds?
DP: The intelligence community rarely fails to investigate issues of high importance to national security or to the President personally. So it would surprise me if efforts have not been made, or are not being made, to either corroborate or refute some of the information that has been put out there.
Steve Hirsch is the senior national security editor at The Cipher Brief.
