Andrew McCabe, the former deputy director of the FBI, said it was hard to keep President Trump’s attention during his daily intelligence briefings if they did not include videos.
The White House defended Trump on Tuesday against accusations that he did not pursue intelligence about Russia paying bounties to the Taliban to kill U.S. and coalition troops in Afghanistan. When questioned why Trump doesn’t read the President’s Daily Brief, press secretary Kayleigh McEnany insisted Trump does read.
“The president does read, and he also consumes intelligence verbally,” she told reporters.
McCabe told CNN’s New Day on Wednesday that McEnany’s explanation does not match his own experience.
“It’s always good to know that your president reads,” he quipped. “It’s not entirely consistent with my own experience with preparing our directors to go to sit with the president, either in national security sessions or in homeland security sessions.”
“In those cases, where the FBI was responsible for briefing or presenting a particular issue, the question we always had was: What are we going to show him on video? It was widely known that if you wanted the president’s attention, you had to bring a video with you to the briefs. Something animated, something with pictures. And If you did not have that, you probably would not get much engagement from the president on your issue,” he said.
It’s long been reported that Trump rarely reads the PDB, a document compiled every day by the U.S. intelligence community that explains the most pressing issues around the world. The president and other senior administration officials receive the top-secret document each day, and a briefer then sits down with the president to go over the information.
The PDB “typically contains anywhere from — let’s say five to six or seven intelligence products,” said McCabe, who was fired by the Trump administration shortly before he was set to retire in early 2018. “Those are usually articles that are a page or two long, so it’s not hard to get through.”
Trump reportedly prefers an oral briefing rather than reading the full document.
The PDB is at the center of controversy over questions about whether Trump knew of the alleged Russian bounties. McEnany said Monday that Trump was not “personally briefed” on the intelligence but would not say whether the information was given to the president in his daily written intelligence briefing.
