On Tuesday's edition of MSNBC's "Morning Joe," Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), a former CIA officer, tore into President Donald Trump's excuse that he didn't pay attention to the Russian bounty intelligence because it wasn't verified and might be a "hoax."
"Listen, you have to check this stuff out and you have to like look at the body of intelligence, but if they're having a debate about it and the NSC is getting a piece of finished intelligence, a report from the CIA, that means the CIA has done their own internal vetting, they've looked at this and they're putting it forward," said Slotkin. "I worked at the NSC under Bush and then under Obama. If we got a report like that, at a minimum you would have a memo slapped on top by the National Security Advisor saying, Mr. President, we're looking into this, but I wanted to make you aware. Here's what we're doing to follow up and I'm going to get back to you on it. In the meantime, let's think through our options with Russia right now to confirm what we're looking at here."
"The fact that didn't happen, it wasn't flagged in that way, just raises my eyebrows," said Slotkin. "I can't imagine a report like this isn't going to the White House without it being in the Presidential Daily Brief. That's something I wrote as a CIA analyst, I briefed to multiple presidents in the Oval Office. With something like this, if there's a body of intelligence, that would go directly to the president, even if his staff didn't feel like they needed to flag it."
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