President Barack Obama has skipped more than HALF of his daily intel briefings

President Barack Obama has skipped more than HALF of his daily intel briefings

Obama has skipped more than HALF of his daily intel briefings – as spies hit back after he blamed them for underestimating ISIS

• Report from the Government Accountability Institute examined the president's public calendar every day since his first inauguration
• He has skipped most of his briefings, attending just 42.1 per cent of them in person
• Daily briefs can also be delivered to the president in writing, and he prefers to read them on his iPad
• On Sunday Obama blamed his Director of National Intelligence for failing to foresee the rise of the ISIS terror army in Iraq and Syria 

By David Martosko, U.S. Political Editor, in Denver

Published: 10:32 EST, 30 September 2014 | Updated: 16:37 EST, 30 September 2014

 

 

President Barack Obama has skipped his in-person daily intelligence briefing on four out of every seven days of his presidency, according to a shocking report released Tuesday.

The Government Accountability Institute, previously best-known for needling members of Congress over insider-trading deals that lax laws have rendered legal, used the official White House calendar to compile a list of the days when Obama wasn't scheduled to receive a briefing.

The resulting numbers showed that he only attended the Presidential Daily Brief 42.1 per cent of the time.

Obama received daily briefings in person only 3 out of every 7 days; this photo shows his November 14, 2012 brief with then-National Security Advisor Tom Donilon, then-Chief of Staff Jack Lew, and then-Deputy National Security Advisor Denis McDonough

Vacuum: Obama reads his briefings alone most of the time, without the benefit of Q&A with his advisers

ABC News reported in 2012 that the president often prefers to receive his daily briefing in writing, and reads it on his iPad. 

An Obama administration national security aide confirmed this to MailOnline on Monday.

'It's pretty well-known that the president hasn’t taken in-person intelligence briefings with any regularity since the early days of 2009,' the aide said. 'He gets them in writing.'

The resulting picture is one of a solitary chief executive consuming his intelligence briefs in a vacuum instead of engaging in two-way conversations with generals and spymasters.

ALL THE PRESIDENTS' BRIEFINGS 

U.S. presidents have handled daily intelligence briefings in a variety of ways, according to the CIA's history of the Presidential Daily Briefing. 

George W. Bush expected oral CIA briefings six days per week and hardly ever missed them, but that often allowed officials to steer the president toward operations that the agency preferred.

Ronald Reagan often got his briefings in writing but largely met only with his National Security Adviser; the National Security Agency was miffed that its reps were seldom invited into the Oval Office.

Jimmy Carter was known for taking notes on his briefing pages as he met with his National Security Adviser, who would returned them to the CIA for analysis and answers.While Richard Nixon was president, his briefings were couriered each morning to National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger. The president was casual about digesting it, but referred to it throughout the day. 

When Gerald Ford became president following Nixon's resignation, he insisted on an oral briefing from the CIA as his first meeting every morning so he could keep up with Kissinger, who had become Secretary of State. 

The personal disconnect between the Oval Office and the intelligence community has been a sore spot for the military, the CIA and the National Security Agency since early in the Obama presidency.

Those tensions came to a head on Sunday, when the president blamed Director of National Intelligence James Clapper for failing to foresee the ISIS terror army's rise to power.

Clapper 'has acknowledged that, I think, they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria,' he said during a '60 Minutes' interview.

Responses from the intel community were both fast and furious. 

'Either the president doesn’t read the intelligence he’s getting or he’s bulls***ting,' a former senior Pentagon official told the Daily Beast.

The national security aide who spoke to MailOnline said that 'unless someone very senior has been shredding the president's daily briefings and telling him that the dog ate them, highly accurate predictions about ISIL (also called ISIS) have been showing up in the Oval Office since before the 2012 election.'

'We were seeing specific threat assessments' from the intelligence community,' the staffer said, 'and many of them have panned out exactly as we were told they would.' 

Under the bus: During a recent interview the president blamed his national intel director, James Clapper, for failing to spot the rise of ISIS

Bombing run: An F-22A Raptor is pictured refueling before carrying out airstrikes in Syria on September 26

ISIS, the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, has steamrolled its way through one-third of Iraq and Syria and left ethnic cleansing and millions of refugees in its wake.

After the deadly 2012 terror attack on a U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya, Breitbart.com found that Obama had not attended an in-person daily briefing on the five days preceding the highly organized assault by an al-Qaeda-linked militia group.

American Crossroads, a conservative political group, leapt into the fray with an ad lambasting the president for skipping his briefings while maintaining a steady presence on golf courses.

'Mr President: It's time to show up for work,' blared the biting video.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2775047/Report-White-House-intelligence-gap-Obama-skipping-FOUR-seven-daily-briefings.html#ixzz4SjURNYaU
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook