Interesting piece about Mueller at FBI by CIA officer who gave him intelligence briefing every day

Benjamin Wittes @benjaminwittes 1h1 hour ago
In case you missed this yesterday evening amidst the craziness, don’t miss today this exceptionally interesting piece by the CIA officer who briefed Bob Mueller every day for a year. https://t.co/VyFidkisyw

What I Learned From Briefing Robert Mueller
by David Priess

{snip}

...For more than a year, while serving as a CIA officer, I was his daily intelligence briefer in his role as director of the FBI. Five, often six, days a week I delivered to him the president’s daily brief (PDB) as well as voluminous other pieces of intelligence information and analytic assessments, primarily on terrorism.

Back in those days, the attorney general and the FBI director typically took their daily CIA report together, in the FBI’s Secure Information Operations Center (SIOC) conference room. At almost exactly the same time that I briefed them on the PDB, one of my colleagues did the same for President George W. Bush in the Oval Office. As my session with Attorney General John Ashcroft and Mueller ended, the two would proceed briskly down to the garage of the J. Edgar Hoover Building to get a brief ride up Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House—where, as the president’s briefer wrapped up his PDB session, the attorney general, FBI director, and homeland security adviser would enter the Oval Office. Bush would hear from each of them and lead daily discussions about how to use that day’s top secret information and analysis to protect the United States from additional attacks.

...presenting complex information to Mueller, watching him digest it, answering his inevitable questions, and chatting with him and his staff on the margins of the sessions afforded me insight that I can appropriately share regarding his approach to complex problem sets—from L’Affaire Russe to Mueller’s personal style. This experience gave me confidence then about the fight against terrorism and the integrity of the Bureau under his watch, and it gives me confidence now in the work he is doing as special counsel.

What stood out to me most upon my starting the job, just months after 9/11, were Mueller’s attention to detail and his desire to understand how the CIA analysts arrived at their assessments. For a while, most of my briefings devolved into de facto intelligence hazing rituals. I discovered the hard way that when my presentation casually offered judgments lacking robust sourcing or logic, Mueller would ask me about the substantiation or argumentation until either my desperate searching through background materials could satisfy him or—more often in those first few months—I admitted that I’d have to get back to him after talking to the experts on that issue.

He wasn’t sending me down rabbit holes for the joy of doing so; he simply didn’t seem to trust analysis anchored to weak evidence or unclear reasoning. Inevitably, my follow-up on his questions resulted in either a quick nod of thanks or, particularly during the early briefings, another set of questions sending me back for more. Never did I feel that I’d been sent on a fishing expedition. Anything that initially appeared to be a tangent ended up having a purpose, usually to help him bring into focus one of the many pictures we were puzzling over.

In time, I came to appreciate the way he thought...

read more: https://www.lawfareblog.com/what-i-learned-briefing-robert-mueller