But the real hoax is how White House officials are covering up for Trump's incompetence as commander in chief who is responsible for the welfare of the US military and who has consistently maintained a bizarre bromance with a former KGB officer, Russian President Vladimir Putin.

On Monday White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said of the intelligence surrounding the Russian bounties, "there were dissenting opinions within the intelligence community, and it would not be elevated to the president until it was verified." Robert O' Brien, Trump's national security adviser, similarly tweeted that because the intelligence hadn't been "verified" the president wasn't briefed.

But this explanation makes no sense at all. Presidents get plenty of unverified information. Intelligence is not like mathematics where 2+2 can always be "verified" to make 4.

Think of the operation during which Osama bin Laden was killed by US Navy SEALs in Abbottabad, Pakistan in 2011.

There was no "verified" intelligence that bin Laden was in Abbottabad. It was an entirely circumstantial case that he might be there, and former President Barack Obama had to make the call to dispatch the SEALs on a potentially quite dangerous mission despite the fact there was significant dissent within the intelligence community about the likelihood that bin Laden was there.

As I found when I was reporting my book "Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden from 9/11 to Abbottabad," in the weeks before Obama ordered the bin Laden raid, a small intelligence "Red Team" was tasked to examine the intelligence that bin Laden might be in Abbottabad. The team came back with a range of estimates that al Qaeda's leader was in Abbottabad varying from 40% to 60% confidence. When Obama ordered the risky bin Laden operation he did so knowing that there was likely only a 50/50 chance that he was in Abbottabad.

And that gets to the nature of intelligence. When the US intelligence agencies examine an issue of particular importance to US policymakers they often will issue a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE). The word "estimate" is telling. US opponents cloak their actions in secrecy and so the American intelligence community tries to break through this veil of secrecy typically with some combination of human sources, signals intelligence and satellite imagery. This doesn't typically produce a "verified" truth but rather an estimate that often comes with varying levels of "confidence" from "high" to "low." Here, for instance, is a declassified NIE from 2007 about the history of the Iranian nuclear program

According to his national security adviser, O'Brien, Trump wasn't personally briefed about the Russian bounties. If this is true, the real reason for this seems likely not because that intelligence wasn't important, but that Trump simply doesn't want to hear anything bad about his buddy Putin and so US intelligence officials have consistently downplayed to Trump anything that might make Putin look bad, according to The Madman Th

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