Obama critical of Trump missing security briefings, but missed majority himself
By Rhett October
web posted January 2, 2017
Appearing one evening in December on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” President Obama said:
“I think the President-Elect may say one thing and do another once he’s here because the truth of the matter is it’s a big, complicated world and it doesn’t matter how smart you are, you have to have the best information possible to make the best decisions possible and my experience with our intelligence agencies is, they are not perfect, they’d be the first to acknowledge that, but they are full of extraordinarily hard working, patriotic, and knowledgeable experts and if you’re not getting their perspective – their detailed perspective – then you are flying blind.”
President Obama said this referencing reports that President-elect Trump was attending one security briefing per week, with Vice President-elect Pence attending six of them.
The media has also been quickly critical of Trump only attending weekly security briefings and left-wing social media accounts have blown up with what some call “manufactured outrage” concerning Trump’s weekly attendances.
To hear the media and anti-Trump Facebook posters, it’s an outrage that the President-Elect is missing these important meetings and unprecedented for a president or president-elect to do so. This, they say, shows that Trump does not take the office seriously.
But inquiring minds might ask where the mainstream media and these social posters were when, after six years in office, President Obama had attended a minority of these security briefings himself. According to a report by the Government Accountability Institute, Obama had attended only 42.1% of security briefings after his first 6 years in office.
Much of Obama’s lack of attendance came out in a 60 Minutes interview over two years ago when Obama was pressed on his administration’s inaction in preventing the rise of ISIS. Obama shifted blame to the intelligence personnel around him, saying, “I think our head of the intelligence community, Jim Clapper, has acknowledged that I think they underestimated what has been taking place in Syria.”
Members of the Defense establishment were apparently stunned by Obama’s attempt to shift blame.
“Either the president doesn’t read the intelligence he’s getting or he’s bullshitting,” a former senior Pentagon official “who worked closely on the threat posed by Sunni jihadists in Syria and Iraq” told the Daily Beast.
The following Monday, others in the intelligence community joined the response to Obama saying that he’s shown longstanding disinterest in receiving live, in-person briefings that allow the Commander-in-Chief the chance for critical follow-up, feedback and questions.
As reported at Breitbart and the Daily Mail, current and former staffers commented that:
It’s pretty well-known that the president hasn’t taken in-person intelligence briefings with any regularity since the early days of 2009.
It’s starting to affect morale around here. Any time you’re hired by a boss to advise him about what to do in a high-stakes area, and he ignores you for a long time, it’s going to gnaw at you.
So while Obama has jumped on the bandwagon to criticize President-Elect Trump for only weekly attendance of security briefings, it might be that Trump is attending more regularly than President Obama did and that he is better informed since his Vice President attends six days per week.
At the very least we can say that Obama appears to have conveniently changed his tune from when he didn’t seem to think that security briefings warranted much of his time. Maybe he’s speaking as a man who has learned his lesson and is offering genuine advice to the incoming president. Or maybe he’s just taking some final shots at a man who could harm his legacy because Obama believes Trump is going to work harder on behalf of American interests than he did. We will probably never know for sure. One thing we can know, however, is that Obama is throwing stones from a glass house concerning the issue of security-briefings attendance and the contrast in terms of the media giving Obama a pass after six years but being critical of Trump before he’s even taken office wreaks of hypocrisy. In other news, the sun rose again this morning. 
Rhett October is on Twitter @RhettOctober and is a writer for Resistance Feed, a news website dedicated to informing the globalist resistance and exposing socialism. He can be reached at rhettoctober@resistancefeed.com.