briefs which is the crown jewel of our $80 billion a year intelligence apparatus. we spend a lot of money on this. in the pentagon budget it s a rounding error, but it is people risking their lives. the nsa eaves dropping on communications around the world. all so the president can have the best information. past presidents have not always taken an in-person briefing. nixon never did. obama didn t even do it every day, but obama had a national security meeting to discuss classified intelligence after having read every day the daily intelligence brief. it is an honor to get a piece in that. it s like a daily up in of intelligence. if you get a piece in front of the president it s a career maker and trump is ignoring it. then he goes into the briefings when he has one and challenges the premise of the things that intelligence officials are telling him. when they try to convince him, yes, the cia has assessed the
crown prince ordered the murder of jamal khashoggi he demands a level of proof you don t see in intelligence. explain it more. that s key. we saw the reporting about the jamal khashoggi killing you mentioned in the last block. the conclusion the cia had come to. it cannot be without a doubt, is that right? former cia director mike hayden said if it was a fact it wouldn t be intelligence. you don t see perry mason proof in intelligence. but they are scrubbing for intercepts and more is emerging. they may get there. as of a few months ago they didn t have it. they had an assessment with medium to high confidence that this could not have happened without the crown prince ordering it. they had phone calls, meta data and trump didn t want to hear it. he called it a feeling that the cia had which is an insult to the considered work of the intelligence professionals. feeling. this gut instinct he has. we have never had anybody so
this week. meanwhile, president trump openly questions intelligence estimates telling spy chiefs to go back to school. from the president s leaked schedules he attended just 17 intelligence briefings in 85 days. president trump also skips the daily written briefing known as the pdv. this from a piece reported from nbc news. when trump believes something to be true, u.s. officials tell nbc news, it is difficult for them to dissuade him even if they have a mountain of evidence he is wrong. my intelligence people, if they said in fact iran is a wonderful kindergarten, i would disagree with them 100%. mentioned the number of briefings he s had. that s not out of sorts here. is it his interest of them, absorption? the fact that he s receiving very few briefings and not reading the daily intelligence