Author and USA Today columnist Kirsten Powers stated that it seems the White House “was asking” the intelligence community to downplay the terror threat and criticized President Obama for being “disengaged” in his rhetoric towards Vladimir Putin on Friday’s “Special Report” on the Fox News Channel.
Powers said, [relevant remarks begin around 2:10] “the threat [of terrorism] was so downplayed, if you remember how it was downplayed by President Obama, that we had basically taken care of this problem. We now find out that it looks like it’s possible that the books were being cooked by — the intelligence analysis was saying that it was a much bigger threat than what we were hearing about. And somewhere…where it was getting transmitted up to the white house it was changing into something that was much lesser of a threat, which would suggest that the White House was asking for this, because it’s really not in the intelligence committee — intelligence agency’s interest to be downplaying terror threats.”
She later added, “it’s interesting to listen, even in the tone that he’s using, and the way is talking to Putin as though Putin’s going to just not do something because Barack Obama said it’s a mistake. I think it’s so disengaged, right? It’s not this — you need to threaten him, basically, like, you can’t just tell him not it do it because it’s a mistake.”
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