Donald Trump
Filmmaker Michael Moore arrives at Republican president-elect Donald Trump's Trump Tower in New York Eduardo Munoz/ Reuters

American documentarian Michael Moore has issued a stark warning about President-elect Donald Trump's national security briefings, one that harks back to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

In a Facebook post on Tuesday (13 December) Moore chastised the president-elect for refusing to receive daily intelligence briefings. Moore insists "Trump is gonna get us killed".

He points back to August 2001 when George W Bush was on a month-long vacation on his ranch in Texas, cleaning brush and fishing. During the 9/11 Commission in 2004, former CIA Director, George Tenet revealed that he first found out Islamic jihadists were learning how to fly 747's around August 23 2001.

But he couldn't brief the president. "I was not in briefings at this time," Tenet said, because Bush "was on vacation". The two didn't speak for the entire month.

On 6 August Bush received a security briefing titled "Bin Laden determined to strike inside US" from his White House Counsel. "He glanced at it, set it aside and then went fishing for the rest of the day," Moore wrote. He points to a photo of that exact moment included in his film Fahrenheit 9/11.

On the first page of that briefing the document explains terrorist Osama Bin Laden intended to launch an attack with planes. "George W Bush didn't leave the ranch to go back to work for the next four weeks," Moore wrote. "In the fifth week, Bin Laden attacked the US with planes on September 11th."

Former National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice pointed out during her 9/11 Commission testimony that Tenet had briefed the president nearly every day before his holiday.

In an interview on Fox News Sunday Trump defended his decision not to receive the same daily national security briefings. "I'm like a smart person. I don't have to be told the same thing and the same words every single day for the next eight years," he said. Trump has only recently started receiving national security briefings about once a week. Vice-president Mike Pence receives them other days.

Moore called this an "utter neglect of duty" and insisted it "is going to get a lot of innocent people killed." He took Trump to task for being able to meet with celebrities like Kanye West, who he spent 15 minutes with Tuesday (13 December), but not listen to what the intelligence community is telling him.

george w bush mission accomplished
The photo that will haunt George W Bush for the rest of his life: standing under a banner declaring "Mission Accomplished." The cost of the Iraq War has reached $2 trillion. AFP

"That Trump would find it too cumbersome or too annoying to have to sit through 20 minutes of listening to his top intelligence people tell him who's trying to kill us today, simply boggles the mind," Moore wrote. "When the next terrorist attack happens — and it will happen, we all know that — and after the tragedy is over, amidst the death and destruction that might have been prevented, you will see Donald Trump acting quickly to blame everyone but himself."

Moore warned that Trump "will suspend constitutional rights. He will round up anyone he deems a threat. He will declare war, and his Republican Congress will back him".

"He can get up at five in the morning and send angry, childish tweets about how he's being portrayed on SNL ("Not funny! Unwatchable!"), or belittling the local elected union leader in Indiana," Moore wrote, "but he doesn't have time to hear about the threats to our national security."

President Barack Obama took aim at Trump's stance on security briefings on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah late Monday saying "it doesn't matter how smart you are," and that leaders "have to have the best information possible to make the best decisions possible".

There is, Moore said, "no more important meeting every day for the President than the one where he learns what the day's potential threats are to the country".