- President Donald Trump would explode before informants who tried to tell him about Russia’s evil actions towards the United States, according to CNN.
- Multiple sources said this created a chilling effect, leading him to listen less and less about Russian threats and reinforcing his belief in Putin’s good intentions.
- Senior security and intelligence officials denied reports that Trump is unfavorable to receiving intelligence about Russia. Business Insider has reached out to the White House for comment.
- Visit the Business Insider home page for more stories.
President Donald Trump received fewer and fewer warnings about Russia’s behavior toward the US because he would be angry when presented with intelligence, a CNN report said.
Early in his presidency, officials learned to limit their verbal reports on the subject and would often see their written materials ignored, according to several former White House officials quoted in CNN’s Jim Scuitto report.
“The president has created an environment that discourages, if not prohibits, the mention of any intelligence that is not favorable to Russia,” a former high-ranking national security member told CNN.
Current Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, who started in May, and National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien denied the accounts.
A U.S. soldier posted on a mission with the Afghan police on December 20, 2014.
Thomson Reuters
However, they have renewed the relevance to a New York Times report that the Russian-sponsored Taliban-linked bounty killings resulted in the deaths of US soldiers.
Three separate Taliban sources corroborated these claims to Mitch Prothero for Business Insider on Wednesday.
The Associated Press (AP) reported Monday that intelligence officials knew and had informed the president since 2019.
The CNN report on the president’s attitude to intelligence warnings about Russia now offers a possible alternative explanation.
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
Reuters
The CNN report said that early in his presidency, Trump was often infuriated with informants trying to tell him about Russia’s hostile activity toward the United States, including political interference. CNN quoted several former officials for that detail.
They soon learned, according to the report, not to highlight Russia in their briefings.
In many cases, oral briefings on Russia would be avoided altogether and would be left in the president’s long written sessions, which he often didn’t read, according to CNN.
It left officials with difficult decisions about how to prioritize the most crucial information, CNN reported. A former high-ranking intelligence said her policy became “save it for when it matters.”
This led to what a former senior National Security Council official described as “a self-fulfilling prophecy,” in which the less Trump listened to Russian activity, the less he believed Vladimir Putin could mean harm to the United States, CNN said.
Ratcliffe, the Director of National Intelligence, told CNN in a statement that this was “totally false.”
O’Brien said the claims were “ridiculous” and only supported the White House’s claims that the intelligence was not reliable enough to transmit it, CNN reported.
The CNN report is also in line with Trump’s well-documented deference to Putin despite the warnings. As a former US ambassador to Russia put it in a tweet on Wednesday, Trump “always sided with Putin.”
Business Insider has reached out to the White House for comment, but did not receive an immediate response.
