President Barack Obama knocked President-elect Donald Trump’s rejection of daily intelligence briefings, saying any president who refuses them would be “flying blind.”
During an appearance Monday night on “The Daily Show,” Obama told host Trevor Noah that Trump’s assertion that he doesn’t need daily briefings because he’s “a smart person” is a mistake.
“It doesn’t matter how smart you are,” Obama said. “You have to make the best information possible to make the best decisions possible.”
“If you’re not getting their perspective their detailed perspective, then you are flying blind,” he continued.
Obama held out a little bit of hope that Trump would opt into the briefings once he takes office.
“I think the President-elect may say one thing and do another once he’s here,” Obama said.
The President also discussed the CIA’s recent allegations of Russian interference in the U.S. election as well as his call for intelligence agencies to draft a report of their findings on the topic. Though Trump has laughed off the CIA’s allegations, Obama said the report will help to inform government agencies and the media about how to move forward should such hacking happen again in the future.
“The president-elect in some of his political events, specifically said to the Russians, ‘Hack Hillary’s emails so that we can finally find out what’s going on and confirm our conspiracy theories,’” Obama said. “The real question that I think we all have to reflect on is what’s happened to our political system where some emails that were hacked and released ended up being the overwhelming story and the constant source of coverage, breathless coverage that was depicted as somehow damning in all sorts of ways — when the truth of the matter was it was fairly routine stuff.”
Watch below via Comedy Central:
With President Obama constitutionally unable to serve past January 20, and the thought of that person taking office, there is only one option left to us.
Everyone here knows how much I love Obama but he is delusional. I am also pissed off at him for not coming out with the Russian hacking story for fear he would look partisan. Does he think the republicans would do the same if the tables were turned - and in view of the information which Comey and the Justice Department knew of why hasn’t he asked for Comey’s resignation and where the fuck was Loretta Lynch,
No one likes a Diogenes. Wolf Blitzer will do.
I imagine for someone with the attention span of a six year old those meetings must be excruciating. Playing president for an audience must be so much more fun then the real thing.
Trump says daily briefings are the same stuff over and over and he just wants to know when something changes. With his attention span, how does he know that? And with his dull sense for nuance, what’s the chance that they really are the same thing over and over? Bottom line is he doesn’t have the right stuff to do the job.