Neither Major Party Candidate Received Intelligence Briefing After Manhattan Blast Saturday

On Saturday night at an event in Colorado Springs, Republican nominee Donald Trump told a crowd, “Just before I got off the plane, a bomb went off in New York and nobody knows exactly what’s going on.”

It was just hours after a garbage explosion in the Manhattan neighborhood of Chelsea left 29 people injured. It wouldn’t be for another two hours after Trump spoke about the bombing that New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio would even weigh in with the fact that the incident, “was an intentional act.”

And now, according to NBC News’s Andrea Mitchell, we know that Trump was never briefed on the events in Manhattan that night. For that matter, neither was his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.

“Who briefed Donald Trump? How did he get brief? I finally tried to track it down,” Mitchell told Morning Joe Tuesday. The Trump campaign was not able to provide media outlets with any evidence of knowing that the blast was in fact a bomb when he spoke or whether he had been in touch personally with anyone familiar with the situation.

“There was no intelligence briefing of either candidate on Saturday night,” she continued. “There was no follow-up period. [I] t was basically that somebody on his staff probably said, ‘Hey a bomb went off.'”

Sounds like real ironclad official type stuff to me.

On Sunday Clinton told press, “I’ve been briefed about the bombings in New York and New Jersey and I’ll have more to say it once we actually know the facts.”

Mitchell also admitted that “officials in DC” hadn’t even known about the bombing — “which isn’t terribly comforting,” she joked.

Watch above via MSNBC.

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J.D. Durkin (@jiveDurkey) is an editorial producer and columnist at Mediaite.
[images via Gage Skidmore / Flickr]