Rep. Slotkin: Trump Should Have Gotten Russia-Taliban Reports

Rep. Elissa Slotkin, a former CIA officer and National Security Council member, Tuesday slammed President Donald Trump's comments about reports that Russia had paid Taliban military to kill American soldiers, saying that any such intelligence must be examined carefully and not dismissed as a hoax, and she believes Trump got the report.

"You have to like look at the body of intelligence," the Michigan Democrat said on MSNBC's "Morning Joe." "If they’re having a debate about it and the National Security Council 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."

She added that she worked at the NSC under former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and if there had been a report like the one about Russia and the Taliban, "at a minimum, you would have a memo slapped on top by the national security adviser 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.'"

But that didn't happen, said Slotkin, who served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs under Obama, and she finds that suspicious. 

"I can’t imagine a report like this isn’t going to the White House without it being in the Presidential Daily Brief," she said. "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.”

The bottom line, even if the information had still been under investigation, if there was a bounty on American soldiers, "when it's something that important, that piece would have gone to the president," said Slotkin. "If there was a dissent, it would have been flagged for him. There would have been a note and the national security adviser would help him work through it…. so the idea he wasn't told or didn't know is really hard, either he got it and he's not remembering or saying, or the staff didn't provide it to him, and both feel like a problem."

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