In his first interview with “The Daily Show” host Trevor Noah, President Barack Obama addressed Donald Trump’s claim that he doesn’t need daily intelligence briefings.
“The President-elect may say one thing and do another once he is here because the truth of the thing is, it’s a big complicated world, it doesn’t matter how smart you are, you have to have the best possible information to make the best decision possible,” Obama said Monday night in a taped interview at the White House.
Obama then described the intelligence workers who provide the briefings as “extraordinarily hard-working, patriotic and knowledgeable experts” and added, “If you’re not getting their perspective, their detailed perspective, you’re flying blind.”
The outgoing president also spoke on the proposed review of potential hacking by the Russian government in order to tilt the election in favor of Trump.
“When the DNC got hacked, we immediately assigned our intelligence community — our law enforcement — to investigate what had happened,” he said.
“And we determined and announced in October that it was the consensus of all the intelligence agencies in law enforcement that organizations affiliated with Russian intelligence were responsible for the hacking of the DNC materials that were being leaked. That was a month before the election. This was not a secret.”
Watch the full interview below.