CNN's New Day guests were talking about the testimony of the national intelligence figures yesterday during their annual report to Congress
"The other big story this morning, the chasm revealed between the nation's intelligence chiefs and the president of the United States," John Berman said.
"Direct contradictions between their assessments and the president's claims. And in the bigger picture it adds to the president's isolation -- rebuffed by the intelligence community, abandoned by many in his own party on the shutdown as the president enters his fifth day with no public schedule. Watch how clearly top officials split from him before Congress on the world's greatest hot spots."
They then showed a montage of Trump statements vs. those of the intelligence chiefs.
"All right. joining us, Laura Coates, David Sanger, Joe Lockhart. David, I want to start with you. These were direct contradictions between the intelligence chiefs and what the president has said and the director of national intelligence Dan Coats even put it more succinctly: 'My job is to present the facts regardless of what the politics are.' What did you see?" Berman said.
"it was a remarkable show in the senate yesterday and yet at the same time it was completely unsurprising. One of the oddities of covering the Trump administration is that there is this divorce between the ground facts that the intelligence community and others are supposed to bring to the president and then the decisions they go and reach. It's not that the president can't look at the intelligence and then decide he's going to ignore it, he's going to go off in a direction somebody else hasn't done, that's his right.
"But what the president frequently then does is goes back and tries to argue that the underlying facts that he's being presented by the intelligence community aren't underlying facts. Well, here you get in the one time each year when all the intelligence chiefs have to sit in front of the Senate and speak in an unclassified session, the truth was the clearest example that denuclearization is on the way, him and Kim have reached this agreement and every time that we hear stories that they've got missile bases, we get the fake news tweet. Well, it's now it's Dan Coates that's going to get that fake news tweet," Sanger said.
"This is foreign policy by feeling rather than by facts. And the feeling -- and President Trump I think has been pretty upfront about this, he has great chemistry with Kim Jong-Un. So it must be true," Alysin Camerota said.
"He admires Vladimir Putin so it must be true. and instead of looking at the surveillance, the aerial photos of laboratories still cooking things, he feels that they had a connection and, I mean, you just couldn't have been more stark with the people who have seen the facts and have seen the actual intel saying, no, this cannot be based on feelings."
