President Donald Trump was repeatedly made aware of the threat the coronavirus posed to the U.S. in his Daily Brief back in January, The Washington Post reports.
Current and former U.S. officials told the newspaper that the president continued to downplay the threat when he was warned during more than a dozen classified briefings on the virus.
The President’s Daily Brief is a daily report that brings to the president’s attention any security threats and important global news. In January and February, officials said, the report focused on the spread of the virus, called out China for suppressing information, and discussed the death toll the virus could cause and possible economic fallout.
Officials told The Washington Post that Trump routinely skips reading the President’s Daily Brief and often is impatient for the oral summary he receives just two or three times per week.
It is unclear how many times the coronavirus was mentioned in the briefings, but officials said that it received similar attention to when intelligence is tracking active terrorism threats or other global security issues.
ABC News reports another intelligence report issued by the military's National Center for Medical Intelligence warned of the virus back in November.
"Analysts concluded it could be a cataclysmic event," one of the sources told ABC of the NCMI’s report.
"It was then briefed multiple times to" the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s Joint Staff and the White House, according to ABC. The Pentagon denied the report existed.
The first mention of the coronavirus in the Daily Brief was in early January and focused on Wuhan, China.