I REMEMBER WHEN MANIPULATING INTELLIGENCE FOR POLITICAL REASONS WAS THE WORST THING EVER: GOP rep: Obama responsible for manipulated intel about ISIS.

President Obama and other senior administration officials created a political climate that led intelligence officials to create warped reports about the United States’s fight against Islamic extremists, a leader of a Republican task force studying the matter said on Thursday.

“They wanted a good news story,” Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.), one of three GOP lawmakers leading a House task force into alleged intelligence manipulation at the Pentagon’s Central Command, told The Hill.

“Is there a memo from Barack Obama saying, ‘Don’t send me bad news’? We haven’t yet found that,” he added.

“But in every organization I’ve ever been a part of … leaders set a culture and the team that works around that leader understands the expectations of that leader,” Pompeo said. “Here that led to manipulation of an intelligence product that was extremely important to keeping our kids safe.”

The comments magnify the criticism in an initial report published by the task force on Thursday that concluded that Centcom reports about the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria were “consistently more optimistic” than analysts on the ground.

Centcom reports “consistently described U.S. actions in a more positive light than other assessments from the [intelligence community] and were typically more optimistic than actual events warranted,” the task force claimed.

The findings are a harsh indictment of the Pentagon’s anti-ISIS efforts and are likely to add to the chorus of criticism about the Obama administration’s approach towards the extremist group. The U.S. fight against ISIS hit its two-year mark this week, in what administration officials describe as steady progress against the group’s self-proclaimed caliphate in Iraq and Syria.

But the fight has been marred by persistent setbacks, and at times Obama and other senior leaders appeared to have underestimated ISIS’s strength, such as during a 2014 interview in which Obama referred to ISIS as the “JV team.”

I’d be happy if our own leadership team was JV. It’s more like PeeWee League.