Tuesday, June 28, 2016

Obama Did Not Ask for an Intel Brief the Day After the Benghazi Attack, He was to busy flying off to Los Vegas


 


Among the many revelations that will emerge from the voluminous majority report of the Benghazi Select Committee when it is released Tuesday is this one: Barack Obama skipped his daily intelligence briefing one day after the Benghazi attacks on September 11, 2012. The president's briefer handed a written copy of the presidential daily briefing to a White House usher and then briefed Jack Lew, who was then serving as White House chief of staff. But Obama, who sometimes avails himself of the oral briefing that is offered along the written intelligence product, did not ask for such a briefing the day after the attacks on U.S. facilities in Libya.
That disclosure came during the Benghazi committee's transcribed interview with the executive coordinator of Obama's presidential daily briefing (or PDB, for short), a veteran intelligence officer who rose through the ranks in Army intelligence and then the Defense Intelligence Agency before serving as the president's top briefer. It is buried deep in the committee's report, in Appendix H—a 14-page examination of how that briefer came to include an assessment in the PDB that the Benghazi attacks were likely a planned attack and not a protest gone awry. It's not unusual for Obama to skip his oral briefing, but his decision to pass on the PDB on September 12, 2012, will no doubt generate additional questions.

The disclosure also sheds some additional light on the president's engagement during and after the attacks—an area that has remained something of a black hole throughout previous Benghazi investigations. The White House has provided little detail on Obama's activities throughout the Benghazi attacks and their aftermath, refusing to answer to questions from journalists about the president's whereabouts and actively working to keep information from investigators with the Select Committee. During the interview with the president's briefer, a lawyer from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, who sat in on the session, twice ended exchanges between committee staff and the briefer.
http://nation.foxnews.com/2016/06/28/obama-did-not-ask-intel-brief-day-after-benghazi-attack

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