Clapper, Comey, Brennan and Rogers walk into a room…
Today, while the rest of Manhattan was getting lunch, Donald Trump received an intelligence briefing from our nation’s top spies. America’s espionage leadership made the pilgrimage to Trump Tower to give the president-elect their collective assessment of what Russia did to our election last year. At 12:30, they sat down with the man who will be inaugurated our 45th president in exactly two weeks and delivered the most anticipated intelligence briefing in years.
It’s not every day our spy bosses tag-team a presentation, but this was of course no ordinary intel brief. James Clapper, our Director of National Intelligence, led the effort, backed by Admiral Mike Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency and the head of U.S. Cyber Command, plus John Brennan and James Comey, the directors of the CIA and the FBI, respectively. In other words, this was the premier spy event of the season.
The briefing was highly classified—Top Secret-plus—so we don’t know exactly what Clapper and the others had to say, but we can make an educated guess based on their testimony yesterday to the Senate Armed Services Committee. The leaders of our Intelligence Committee didn’t mince words, even though their comments were at the unclassified level and therefore lacking much detail about how they know what they do about Kremlin spy-games in 2016.
The IC’s joint statement to senators on cybersecurity left no doubt how our spy agencies look at what happened over the last year:
Read the rest at The Observer…
The XX Committee 