President Trump continues to reject the judgments of U.S. spy agencies on major foreign policy fronts, creating a dynamic in which intelligence analysts frequently see troubling gaps between the president’s public statements and the facts laid out for him in daily briefings on world events, current and former U.S. officials said.
The pattern has become a source of mounting concern to senior U.S. intelligence officials who had hoped that Trump would become less hostile to their work as he settled into office and more receptive to the information that spy agencies spend billions of dollars and sometimes put lives at risk gathering.
Instead, presidential distrust that once seemed confined mainly to the intelligence community’s assessments about https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/the-apprentice-book-excerpt-at-cias-russia-house-growing-alarm-about-2016-election-interference/2018/09/18/51eb1732-b5c5-11e8-94eb-3bd52dfe917b_story.html?utm_term=.a87cab42505f (Russia’s interference in the 2016 election) has spread across a range of global issues. Among them are https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-spy-agencies-north-korea-is-working-on-new-missiles/2018/07/30/b3542696-940d-11e8-a679-b09212fb69c2_story.html?utm_term=.d8aa148b520d (North Korea’s willingness to abandon its nuclear weapons program), https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/iran-asks-europe-what-it-can-offer-to-keep-it-in-the-nuclear-deal-after-us-pullout/2018/05/25/f0e8be70-6011-11e8-8c93-8cf33c21da8d_story.html?utm_term=.b0a503a1e95c (Iran’s nuclear and regional ambitions), the existence and https://www.washingtonpost.com/energy-environment/2018/12/11/united-states-isnt-only-country-downplaying-climate-change/?utm_term=.abeca92a6fd0 (implications of global climate change)and the https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/cia-director-briefs-senators-on-saudi-role-in-khashoggi-killing/2018/12/04/e6d6498c-f7d5-11e8-8d64-4e79db33382f_story.html (role of the Saudi crown prince) in the murder of a dissident journalist.
“There is extraordinary frustration,” a U.S. intelligence official said. The CIA and other agencies continue to devote enormous “time, energy and resources” to ensuring that accurate intelligence is delivered to Trump, the official said, but his seeming imperviousness to such material often renders “all of that a waste.”
White House officials disputed the contention that Trump is uninterested in intelligence assessments.
But U.S. officials involved in interactions with the White House said that the disconnect between spy agencies and the president is without precedent and that senior analysts have spent the past year struggling to find ways to adapt to an arrangement they described as dysfunctional.
Many have taken to writing “for the record,” officials said, meaning that they generate reports to document intelligence community warnings on North Korea, Iran and other subjects.
Briefings of Cabinet officials have taken on new urgency, officials said, because Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and others are seen as influential on policy issues and potential conduits to the president.