Two weeks ago, Peter Schweizer’s Government Accountability Institute reported that President Obama was ditching over half of his intelligence briefings. According to their study, drawn from Obama’s own White House calendar, “During his first 1,225 days in office, Obama attended his PDB just 536 times — or 43.8 percent of the time. During 2011 and the first half of 2012, his attendance became even less frequent — falling to just over 38 percent.” Breitbart News covered Obama’s briefings shortcomings from the outset, bringing pressure to bear on the Obama administration to get their president to sit down and hear our intelligence. Our first story posted September 10, 2012. The next day, our consulate in Benghazi was attacked and our ambassador was murdered.
The Obama administration immediately fought back, with White House spokesman Jay Carney explaining, “The President of the United States gets the presidential briefing every day.”
That sent the Washington Post‘s Obama-acolyte fact checker Glenn Kessler on a rampage. First, he labeled the claim that Obama “skips” his intelligence briefings “bogus.” He gave it three Pinocchios. Then he updated his column to give the claim four Pinocchios, explaining, “Upon reflection, we now realize that the GAI report had a bit of a math problem. The White House public schedule does not list meetings on weekends, so Obama automatically loses 28 percent of the “meetings” because of that fact.” This, of course, was not true – the GAI report took into account weekends, since it cross-tabulated White House data with Politico’s own data on Obama’s activities, which includes weekends.
But Kessler and the Obama lackeys have another problem. The public outcry over Obama missing his intelligence briefings has caused Obama to start attending his intelligence briefings.
According to Kessler’s own Washington Post.
Today, the Washington Post reported that President Obama is now attending nearly “100 percent” of his intelligence briefings. If the original claim was so bogus, why is Obama suddenly overhauling his schedule to attend significantly more intelligence briefings?
If these were all lies, it’s news to Obama.
“Next thing you know,” writes Al Kamen of the Post, “the White House Calendar, starting Sept. 14 (four days after Thiessen’s column) and for every workday last week and up to Monday, says that Obama — and sometimes, Vice President Biden — is briefed. No comment yet from the White House on why the apparent recent uptick in Obama’s ‘attendance.'”
According to Kessler and his other fact-checking Obama bootlickers, this must all be just a giant coincidence. Unless he’s willing to give his colleagues at the Washington Post a few Pinocchios.