Sen. John McCain said Tuesday he's "not too surprised" by a column in The Washington Post that showed the president only attended 44 percent of his national intelligence briefings through May.
"This was the same Sen. Obama who said the surge would not succeed, that it was doomed to fail," McCain told Fox News. "This was the same president who has pulled all of our troops out of Iraq without leaving a residual force, and the place is unraveling. Al Qaeda is making a comeback."
McCain went on to say, "so as far as the Middle East is concerned, this president's national security policy has been an abysmal failure."
White House press secretary Jay Carney dismissed the report Tuesday as "hilarious," dismissing the criticism by
Post columnist Marc Thiessen as simply a difference in the way the Obama administration handled intelligence briefings.
"He gets it every day, okay?" Carney said. "The president of the United States gets the presidential daily briefing every day. There is a document that he reads every day when he is not — well, he always reads it every day because he’s a voracious consumer of all of his briefing materials. And when he is physically here, most days he has a meeting in his office, the Oval one, with participants in his national security team."
Asked if there was a distinction between the written briefing and sitting in on the daily meetings, Carney defended the president's record on national security.
"I believe if you compare our foreign policy record with the one that preceded this one, we’re comfortable with that comparison," Carney said. "And this president is very much steeped in the details of national security issues and the information that as president he received."
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