Why Trump doesn’t want to hear about intelligence

What Digby said:

There is plenty of skepticism about the intelligence community’s conclusions along all sides of the political spectrum. Trump is dismissing it out of hand. Most of the Republicans are keeping their powder dry, although hawkish Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham seem convinced, as do most Democrats. And after witnessing the weapons of mass destruction analysis prior to the invasion of Iraq in the past decade, many people on the left are naturally suspicious of the intelligence agencies.

Now is probably a good time to revisit that episode and remind ourselves of how it unfolded. Seymour Hersh’s original New Yorker article, “The Stovepipe,” exploring the way it all went down, still holds up today. The intelligence agencies got it wrong, for sure. But, as he explained, there was a specific reason:

What the Bush people did was dismantle the existing filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policymakers from getting bad information. They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership. Their position is that the professional bureaucracy is deliberately and maliciously keeping information from them.

This was why members of the left championed truth tellers deeply enmeshed in the Republican establishment and the intelligence community, like former ambassador Joe Wilson and his wife Valerie Plame, when they boldly stepped up.