***To read the full blog, please check out the complete post on NewsBusters***
Mere moments after President Trump got done announcing that the United States had eliminated ISIS founder and leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, CNN was off to the races criticizing much of what the President said. CNN host Jake Tapper was leading a largely anti-Trump, Obama-era panel of former intelligence community officials during a special two-hour edition of his Sunday show, State of the Union.
After giving a rundown of what the President said in his speech and the following press conference, Tapper looked at his panel and wondered: “Were you concerned at all, listening to that, whether he was giving too much information? I mean, I'm a journalist, I want it all, but I saw some grimaces around this table.”
First to speak was Obama’s former Homeland Security adviser, Lisa Monaco who took issue with how many details of the raid Trump was sharing with the American people:
LISA MONACO (Obama Homeland Security adviser): Yeah, I was struck. I was struck by the details about having known ahead of time. I believe that's what the president said, that they knew ahead of time that there were tunnels, they knew ahead of time that there were booby traps. That says to me that there was some rather unique and probably exquisite intelligence that had been gathered, most likely from somebody on the ground. So, that's potentially concerning, and I wonder how intelligence professionals who have labored long and hard on this operation felt hearing that.
Tapper was concerned with who President Trump thanked during his address. “He started with Russia and then talked about Syria, Turkey, Iraq. He then said that there was some support from the Kurds. He did ultimately thank, obviously, the special operators and the intelligence community,” he said.
Remember that last point, because a few minutes later Tapper would go on to decry how Trump supposedly didn’t thank the CIA and Director Gina Haspel.
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