The campaigns for President Donald Trump and Joe Biden have refused counterintelligence briefings about possible threats during the upcoming election, an intelligence official told The Washington Times.
“You have the Trump campaign and the Biden campaign not agreeing on much, but one thing they did agree on is they don’t want the FBI briefing them,” the official said.
In the past, these briefings had been conducted by the FBI, but the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has passed along the task to the "larger U.S. intelligence community."
Threat briefings are now arranged by Bill Evanina, director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center who was appointed during the Obama administration. The agency is a part of the ODNI.
“U.S. elections are the foundation of our nation’s democracy,” Evanina said in an ODNI statement. “We are committed to supporting this administration’s whole-of-government effort to secure the 2020 election.”
A Trump representative declined to verify whether it turned down the briefings.
The unnamed intelligence official thinks the Biden campaign turned down the briefings because the ODNI would investigate Hunter Biden's dealings with a Ukraine energy company during his father's tenure as vice president.
“The fact that both the Trump and Biden campaigns have refused defensive counterintelligence (CI) briefings proposed by the DNI from the FBI is the latest indicator of the depth of distrust for today’s highly politicized FBI,” Brad Johnson, a former CIA operations officer, told The Washington Times.
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