INTELLIGENCE/JAMES CLAPPER/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “When former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper questioned President Donald Trump’s ‘fitness to be in this office’ after the President’s wild speech in Phoenix Tuesday [8-22-17] night, it was likely only a matter of time before the President aimed his Twitter ire at the retired general.
Indeed, Thursday morning came the tweet from the President: ‘James Clapper, who famously got caught lying to Congress, is now an authority on Donald Trump. Will he show you his beautiful letter to me?’
In an interview, Clapper told CNN about the ‘beautiful letter.’
‘The night before the election, we deployed two teams so that we would be ready to provide a PDB brief the next morning to whomever won,’ Clapper recounted, referring to the Presidential Daily Briefing. ‘I hand-wrote almost identical short notes to each of the two candidates to accompany the first brief as President-elect; only one actually got deployed — the one to him.’
The note to Clinton, which went undelivered, congratulated her on her victory and said the intelligence community stood by to serve her with the best intelligence it could muster. The note to Trump said the same thing…
On January 6, leaders of the intelligence community traveled to Trump Tower in New York City to brief then-President-elect Trump on the Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian interference in the election. Clapper remembers Trump specifically thanking him for the note three times.”
-Jake Tapper, “Intel chief sheds light on ‘beautiful letter’ Trump says he wrote him,” CNN Politics, CNN.com, Aug. 24, 2017 06:44pm