Thread by @GeorgeCroner

I apologize in advance for the length of this thread but Andrew McCarthy's recent (8/6/2020) article in National Review decrying the lack of a "defensive briefing" for the Trump campaign requires a response. So here goes. /1

I will try and recount what actually happened during the counterintelligence defensive briefing that candidate Donald Trump received from the FBI on 8/17/16. I use the term “counterintelligence defensive briefing’ because In an October 26, 2017 letter to Sen. Charles Grassley, /2

the FBI confirmed that it had provided a “counterintelligence defensive briefing” to the Trump campaign and that this “defensive briefing" “focused on a broad range of threats posed by foreign intelligence entities.” This is October 2017. James Comey is long gone as Director, /3

and the FBI has been operating as part of Trump’s executive branch for over 10 months. So, this is the description that the Trump Administration’s FBI used to describe the briefing furnished to then-candidate
Trump. /4

Historically, these briefings are commonly provided to presidential nominees to educate the candidates and their top aides about potential threats from foreign spies.Trump brought Chris Christie and Michael Flynn to his “counterintelligence defensive briefing.” /5

At the time, the FBI had opened, or was about to open, a separate counterintelligence investigation on Flynn based, in part, on Flynn’s involvement in a deal with Turkey using a businessman that the government has credibly accused of being an agent of Turkey to cover up the /6

Turkish government’s direct role in the deal. The Crossfire Hurricane counterintelligence investigation had been opened less than 3 weeks earlier, and was very much in a nascent stage.

The briefing lasted 2 hours, give or take, but ended prematurely when Trump left to catch a /7

plane before all the briefers had completed their presentations.We have this level of detail due to the recently declassified (courtesy of your favorite DNI - John Ratcliffe) memorandum documenting the briefing’s details including the almost puerile questions Trump asked such /8

as: "Joe, are the Russians bad? Because they have more numbers are they worse than the Chinese?” Trump was told that foreign intelligence services might seek to recruit people close to him so that he needed to be mindful of the people on his periphery: /9

specifically, his staff, domestic help, business associates, friends, etc. Those individuals, he was told, may present more vulnerabilities or be more susceptible to an approach. Those individuals were also likely to be targeted for recruitment due to their access to Trump. /10

There is no record that the Trump campaign ever requested that the briefing be resumed so that the unaddressed topics could be discussed. At the time of the 8/17, there were active counterintelligence investigations open, or soon to be opened, on Paul Manafort and Michael /11

Flynn. Two days after the briefing, Manafort would be removed as the Trump campaign manager following reams of adverse publicity describing his own business dealings with Russia-aligned leaders in Ukraine involving allegations of millions of dollars in cash payments and secret/12

lobbying efforts in the U.S.

This idea that the FBI used the pre-election briefing process to gain further insight into the Trump campaign and never provided a “defensive” briefing to Trump is a canard built on a tortured parsing of language by those who continue to insist /13

that the reality of Russian election interference is a “hoax.” McCarthy’s recent article decrying the absence of a “defensive” briefing simply expands on the linguistic two-step that William Barr exhibited in testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee in May 2019. /14

There, Barr initially tried to insist Trump had never been briefed at all, before returning after a break to concede, “I have been told during a break that a lesser kind of briefing, a security briefing that generally discusses threats, apparently was given to the campaign /15

in August [2016].” Well, not ”apparently,” it was given - it lasted nearly 2 hours, which is a lifetime in “trying to hold Donald Trump’s attention without pictures” time - and it specifically told candidate Trump that he needed to be aware of those around him in terms of /16

efforts to infiltrate his campaign. Perhaps this wasn’t “defensive” enough for Trump’s supporters who, by now, must recognize that you need to draw it out in crayon for this president to grasp the significance of intelligence and counterintelligence information. /17

See, e.g., Russian bounties paid to Taliban to kill U.S. troops; Trump’s inaction thereon. Barr has insisted that the FBI should have told Trump specifically that his campaign was being targeted by the Russians (where, exactly, this acknowledgement fits with Barr’s insistence /18

that the idea of any collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia is a “bogus” “hoax” is left unexplained). Barr points out that Trump had 2 former U.S. Attorneys working on the campaign at the time. Actually, it’s 3 if you want to add Jeff Sessions to Rudy Giuliani and /19

Chris Christie and, having identified them, perhaps it says enough simply to note that their presence adds no particular confidence that the security concerns surrounding the Trump campaign were a matter of idle concern. /20

But, I’ll go further and suggest that not one of them, if he had been in charge of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation in August 2017, would have told Joe Pientka, the FBI briefer, to specifically disclose to Trump the FBI’s concerns regarding Flynn or Manafort. /21

So, this whole “defensive” briefing thing is another smokescreen raised by those who, in the absence of any genuine presidential accomplishment, must repeatedly find something to write that appeals to that vanishing breed - the diehard Russia “hoax” believer - /22

you know, that same person who refuses to wear a mask because COVID-19 is a hoax too.

There it's out of my system. /23