Presidential Daily Brief
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/obamas-hypocrisy-on-intelligence-briefings/2016/12/19/8b1fbed0-c5f4-11e6-bf4b-2c064d32a4bf_story.html
Well, that takes chutzpah.
President Obama is criticizing President-elect Donald Trump for failing to attend what The Post calls “the most exclusive, and arguably most important, daily meeting in Washington” — the Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB) — warning his successor that without the daily intelligence brief, “you are flying blind.”
This coming from the same person who skipped more than half of his daily intelligence briefings in his first term. As I reported in this space in 2012, during his first 1,225 days in office, Obama attended his daily meeting to discuss the PDB just 536 times — an attendance record of 43.8 percent. In 2011 and the first half of 2012, his attendance dropped even lower, to just over 38 percent of the time.
Talk about flying blind.
Derek Chollet, a former senior official in the Obama administration, accused Trump of “malpractice” for skipping the same intelligence briefing his former boss regularly skipped, declaring “I think it is totally irresponsible in a post-9/11 world.”
Not only did Obama commit the same malpractice, Obama used the same excuses as Trump to justify it. For example, Trump’s advisers have argued that he gets briefed by many sources and meets regularly with his national security team, including retired Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn. That is precisely the same line of argument the Obama White House used in 2012, when then-National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor told me in an email “this focus on just the PDB and not the countless other NSC meetings the President has each week really misses the point. For example, the President had a briefing with the Principals Committee to review 9/11 threats and mitigation efforts on September 10th. Seems like a relevant data point for your piece.”