After months of railing against President Obama and Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy – and taking hits from both on his own stances – Donald Trump will have his first chance to be briefed on classified intelligence regarding threats to the United States and other security issues.
Fox News confirmed Tuesday that the Republican presidential nominee will be briefed Wednesday, most likely at the FBI field office in New York. The briefing will be led by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn will accompany Trump, sources say.
Such briefings usually run for about an hour and can go longer. Presidential nominees do not need to have a special security clearance to receive the briefings. It is unclear what will be discussed; the campaigns typically work with the ODNI to set up the sessions and discuss topics of interest.
With national security rising as a campaign issue, however, it could be a detailed briefing. The session comes after Trump made a major foreign policy address Monday in which he placed the blame for the rise of Islamic terrorism across the globe at the feet of the Obama administration, and in particular Clinton.
“With one episode of bad judgment after another, Hillary Clinton's policies launched ISIS onto the world stage,” Trump said at the speech in Youngstown Ohio, after lambasting her for the “total disaster” in Libya.
“Instead, all we got from Iraq and our ventures in the Middle East was death, destruction and tremendous financial loss,” he said. “It's time to put the mistakes of the past behind us and chart a new course.”
In the speech, Trump called for an end to nation-building abroad, a new “extreme vetting” of immigrants seeking to enter the U.S., and a “bipartisan and international consensus” to defeat Islamic extremism.
Trump, in return, has been attacked throughout the campaign for a perceived lack of foreign policy chops, with Clinton accusing him Monday of being “all over the place on ISIS.”
“He talked about letting Syria become a free-zone for ISIS, a major country in the Middle East that could launch attacks against us and others. He's talked about sending ground troops, American ground troops -- well, that is off the table as far as I am concerned,” she said in Scranton, Pa.
She concluded by calling him “temperamentally unfit and totally unqualified to be president of the United States and commander-on-chief.”
Vice President Joe Biden also took aim at Trump at the same event.
“No major party nominee in the history of the United States of America has … known less or been less prepared to deal with our national security than Donald Trump,” Biden said.
Biden went a step further to accuse Trump of being sympathetic to totalitarian dictators.
“He's even showered praise on Saddam Hussein, one of the most violent dictators of the 20th century, a man who repeatedly backed terror attacks against Israel because he was supposedly -- the reason he admires him -- he was a killer of terrorists, that's why he likes Saddam,” he said. "He would've loved Stalin, he would've loved Stalin."
It was not immediately clear if a briefing had been set up for Clinton, or when it would take place. Republicans have called for Clinton not to be given classified information in light of FBI Director James Comey’s conclusion that she had been "extremely careless" in her use of a homebrew private email server as secretary of state.
Fox News’ Catherine Herridge and John Roberts contributed to this report.