There's been a lot of reporting in recent days about President Donald Trump's insults to his intelligence chiefs after their annual address to Congress contradicted just about everything the president has said about our country's foreign relations.
The chiefs - Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, CIA Director Gina Haspel and FBI Director Christoper Wray - each year prepare a federally mandated report titled "Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community," and their assessments are notably 180 degrees opposite of what Trump has said recently about China, Russia, North Korea, Venezuela, Mexico, the drug trade - you name it.
The intelligence chiefs told the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday that North Korea is unlikely to give up all of its nuclear weapons and production capabilities. Trump says they have already disarmed. The chiefs say Iran continues to make trouble in the Middle East but is not currently undertaking key nuclear weapons development. Trump says it is. Russia and China are still acting like the disruptors they have always been. Trump defends them and relaxes sanctions against them. ISIS still commands thousands of fighters in Iraq and Syria and will keep attacking. Trump has declared ISIS dead and gone. Global warming is intensifying extreme weather. Trump says he doesn't believe it.
Our president hasn't bothered to meet with any Democrats as the clock ticks down on the 15-day shutdown pause, but he found time to tweet and tweet and tweet about the intelligence chiefs' message and report.
"They are wrong!" he insisted in one message. "Perhaps Intelligence should go back to school!" he said in another. And, of course, he tweeted about immigration: "Three separate caravans marching to our Border "
The Worldwide Threat Assessment makes no mention of a need for a Southern border wall, though it does mention Mexican and Chinese drug traffickers.
But here's what the news anchors and Capitol Hill reporters missed as they tripped over each other to cover the chiefs/Trump he-said, she-said conflict.
The very first threat dealt with in the 42-page document presented by the intelligence chiefs was that of cyber warfare.
Already we knew that Russia (at least Russia) has mucked with our election attitudes using fake news on social media, hacked political emails and databases, pried into our voting data and systems in at least 21 states and created fake news about the Trump/Russia probe by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
But on pages 5 and 6 of the Worldwide Threat Assessment is this:
"Moscow is now staging cyber attack assets to allow it to disrupt or damage US civilian and military infrastructure during a crisis and Russia has the ability to execute cyber attacks in the United States that generate localized, temporary disruptive effects on critical infrastructure - such as disrupting an electrical distribution network for at least a few hours - similar to those demonstrated in Ukraine in 2015 and 2016. Moscow is mapping our critical infrastructure with the long-term goal of being able to cause substantial damage."
Note the present tense in those statements.
And then there's China:
"China presents a persistent cyber espionage threat and a growing attack threat to our core military and critical infrastructure systems. China has the ability to launch cyber attacks that cause localized, temporary disruptive effects such as disruption of a natural gas pipeline for days to weeks - in the United States."
Think about this as our thermometers slowly crawl up over the freezing mark here and remain at sub-zero levels in much of the rest of the country.
There's more.
"Iran has been preparing for cyber attacks against the United States and our allies. It is capable of causing localized, temporary disruptive effects-such as disrupting a large company's corporate networks for days to weeks - similar to its data deletion attacks against dozens of Saudi governmental and private-sector networks in late 2016 and early 2017."
And:
"North Korea continues to use cyber capabilities to steal from financial institutions to generate revenue. Pyongyang's cybercrime operations including a successful cyber heist of an estimated $81 million from the New York Federal Reserve account of Bangladesh's central bank."
The only harsh words our president had about any of this was not for our adversaries, but rather for the American men and women in those intelligence jobs who are seeking to protect us.
And the only thing the Worldwide Threat Assessment didn't address was the threat of Donald Trump.