Thursday, August 10, 2017

Obama's Defense Intelligence Agency knew about North Korean nukes in 2013, Obama tried to suppress it, and WaPo reported neither

So forgive us, Kurt Andersen, for believing in conspiracies.

His side no doubt will respond with one of their own: Trump is leaking lies in order to start a war.

From the story here:

During an April 11, 2013, House Armed Services Committee hearing, Congressman Doug Lamborn, R-Colo., inadvertently revealed several unclassified sentences from a DIA report that said DIA had determined with “moderate confidence” that North Korea has the capability to make a nuclear weapon small enough to be launched with a ballistic missile.

The Director of National Intelligence and Obama officials subsequently tried to dismiss Lamborn’s disclosure by claiming the DIA assessment was an outlier that did not reflect the views of the rest of the U.S. Intelligence Community.

It was clear what Obama officials were doing in 2013.  The DIA report represented inconvenient facts that threatened President Obama’s North Korea “strategic patience” policy -- a policy to do nothing about North Korea and kick this problem down the road to the next president.  Obama officials tried to downplay the DIA assessment to prevent it from being used to force the president to employ a more assertive North Korea policy.

It’s worth noting that the Trump White House has not condemned the Washington Post story as a leak.  That’s probably because it was an authorized disclosure of classified information to advance President Trump’s North Korea strategy.