White House officials said a report disputing the threat posed by travelers from seven predominantly Muslim countries included in President Donald Trump’s executive order was “not the intelligence assessment the president asked for,” according to a report published Saturday by the Wall Street Journal.
“The President asked for an intelligence assessment. This is not the intelligence assessment the President asked for,” an unnamed senior administration official said as quoted in the Wall Street Journal’s report.
Unnamed officials said that the report ignored information that supports the travel ban, per the report, and that they have not yet been presented with the report they requested.
The Associated Press reported on Friday that it had obtained a draft document of the report, which concluded that citizenship of the countries included in Trump’s ban is an “unlikely indicator” of terrorism threat level.
When Trump announced the now-blocked ban in January, however, he specifically cited “foreign terrorist entry” as one threat it would eliminate.
“We all know what that means,” he said.
Gillian M. Christensen, acting press secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, told the Wall Street Journal that the dispute over the report was on the basis of “sources and quality, not politics.”
Neither the White House nor the Department of Homeland Security immediately responded to TPM’s requests for comment.
Wouldn’t it be simpler for the White House if they just stole some letterhead from DHS and wrote their own report?
(Jeez – don’t these people know how to do anything?)
It’s fact-based information, so yeah, it’s not the report the white house was seeking.
The shitstorm of Trump shows no sign of lessening as its malaise-rich bafflement remains The Monster’s surest grip on power…
Republicraps apparently don’t remember the last time they tried to get the IC to lie to support their political agenda.
They can just send Sebastian Gorka (aka Zoltan Karpathy, that Dreadful Hungarian) over to DHS on TDY and they’ll get their desired outcome.