[BostonCard]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-...presidents

Let me rephrase that, if only the President read the daily intelligence briefings.

U.S. intelligence agencies issued warnings about the novel coronavirus in more than a dozen classified briefings prepared for President Trump in January and February, months during which he continued to play down the threat, according to current and former U.S. officials.

The idea that we were blinded to what was going on because China was minimizing the extent of COVID is laughable. It imagines a world in which we don't devote large amounts of money to gathering our own intelligence on all sorts of threats, including pandemic threats, and that there isn't a dedicated way to communicate those threats to the President.

But the alarms appear to have failed to register with the president, who routinely skips reading the PDB and has at times shown little patience even for the oral summary he now takes two or three times per week, according to the officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified material.

You can bring a horse to water, but you can't make it drink; likewise, you can't make the President read or pay attention to intelligence briefings.

BC

[BostonCard]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-...presidents

Let me rephrase that, if only the President read the daily intelligence briefings.

U.S. intelligence agencies issued warnings about the novel coronavirus in more than a dozen classified briefings prepared for President Trump in January and February, months during which he continued to play down the threat, according to current and former U.S. officials.

The idea that we were blinded to what was going on because China was minimizing the extent of COVID is laughable. It imagines a world in which we don't devote large amounts of money to gathering our own intelligence on all sorts of threats, including pandemic threats, and that there isn't a dedicated way to communicate those threats to the President.

But the alarms appear to have failed to register with the president, who routinely skips reading the PDB and has at times shown little patience even for the oral summary he now takes two or three times per week, according to the officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified material.

You can bring a horse to water, but you can't make it drink; likewise, you can't make the President read or pay attention to intelligence briefings.

BC