EXPERT INTERVIEW — It’s a document that rarely makes news, for obvious reasons: the whole point of the President‘s Daily Brief (PDB) – a summary of intelligence and analysis about national security threats and the world’s hot zones – is that it’s put together with classified intelligence and information. Lately, however, the PDB has made headlines involving how it's prepared - and how it's consumed.
Last week, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said she was moving the assembly of the PDB away from the Central Intelligence Agency, which has traditionally been tasked with doing the work, to her own department. That may seem like a minor bureaucratic change, but it raised eyebrows among some in the intelligence community who have participated in the process.
They noted that the infrastructure involved in producing the briefing is housed in the CIA, and that moving it could prove problematic. Beth Sanner, a Cipher Brief expert former Deputy Director of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, who oversaw the PDB during the first Trump administration, said it would be “a huge mistake.”
“It would create inefficiencies and risk miscommunication and mistakes,” Sanner told The New York Times.
Gabbard’s office said the move was ordered to offer the president more “timely and actionable” intelligence.
Also last week, Politico published a report saying that President Trump – who is known to prefer verbal rather than written presentations of intelligence, has all but ceased to receive the PDB in any fashion. The report said that in the first 100 days of Trump’s second term, he had received the PDB only 12 times.
The White House responded to the Politico report by saying that the president gets everything he needs from his top national security aides – whose leaders also receive presentations of the PDB.
“The president is constantly apprised of classified briefings and is regularly in touch with his national security team,” said Davis Ingle, a White House spokesperson. “The entire intelligence community actively informs President Trump in real time about critical national security developments.”
Intelligence community veterans were less charitable.
“The point of having an $80 billion intelligence service is to inform the president to avert a strategic surprise,” a former CIA analyst told Politico.
How much do these things matter?
The Cipher Brief reached out this week to Sanner, the PDB presenter for President Trump during his first term. She spoke about the recent PDB news with Cipher Brief Managing Editor Tom Nagorski. Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
THE CONTEXT
- The President's Daily Brief (PDB) was formally introduced in 1964 for President Lyndon B. Johnson. A prototype of the PDB, called the “President’s Intelligence Check List,” was produced in 1961 for President John F. Kennedy.
- The PDB is coordinated by the Office of the Director of Naval Intelligence (ODNI) and draws on all-source intelligence from the CIA, NSA, FBI and other parts of the intelligence community (IC). It is intended to provide intelligence to the president. It is also used to inform other senior national security officials, including the vice president, the national security advisor, and the secretaries of State and Defense.
- Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence, is moving the assembly of the PDB from CIA headquarters to the ODNI. Officials say the move aims to shore up the role of the ODNI amid vows by the Trump administration to “overhaul” the IC. CIA officers write much of the analysis that goes into the PDB.
- Politico reports that between Inauguration Day and early May, President Trump sat in on only 12 presentations of the PDB by intelligence officials. President Trump reportedly met with intelligence officials to hear the PDB presentation more often – though still less regularly than his predecessors – during his first term.
The Cipher Brief: Can you give us a 101 explanation of the PDB. What is it and why does it exist?
Sanner: It's basically a classified newspaper or newsletter. It's not as long as a newspaper. Most of the [intelligence] community at one point contributes in some way, but most of it right now is written by CIA analysts.
It goes out every day; it's delivered by briefers to the top couple of dozen senior national security officials in the government, from the war fighters to economic policy makers to the regular foreign policy people you would expect, at the secretary and deputy secretary level. But it's prepared with the president in mind. It's his book.
Each president has a very different style with consuming the PDB.
I was the head of the PDB for the ODNI for two years, and then I became the president's briefer when I became deputy DNI. I saw how that worked. With [President Trump], we did oral briefings two to three times a week, my predecessor and myself. That lasted basically a half an hour to as much as an hour. And so that was how he consumed information. But he didn't read.
The Cipher Brief: You said two or three times a week, so not a daily presentation. On those other days, did the PDB just goes into the ether? Did the president not get the briefing?
Sanner: It goes to everybody else, including the National Security Advisor, the Vice President, the Chief of Staff. Generally, all these people in the West Wing are getting it and taking briefings with a briefer, as well as going through the book with their briefer. Some people choose to read, and don't have a briefer.
But in any case, there are multiple people in the West Wing who are getting it on a daily basis. And our assumption, and I think a fairly good one, is that if anything is happening that is urgent, any one of those people would walk in or would make a call up to the residence. I personally did not worry about the cadence of two to three times a week. And in fact, I felt that in a way it worked better, because it allowed me to consolidate multiple stories from different agencies and different sources, the PDB being the central part of that.
I call it storytelling. I don't mean that like a child's book, but I mean putting stories together in a little bit more granularity and complexity. I think it's easier to absorb than going through a book that has six things that are totally not related to each other. You can create a flow, and you can make sense and connect the world a little bit better when you have a cadence that is a long period of time, but spaced out.
But this new report about him only getting [the briefing] maybe once a week now, I personally do not think that that is enough, given the complexity of the world and all of the things going on. I would say it needs to be three times a week.
The Cipher Brief: That report said that in President Trump’s first roughly a hundred days, there had been 12 sessions of in-person presentations of the PDB. The White House was asked for comment and they said the president, whenever he needs something, he has his national security team around him to get it. What's wrong with that answer, if anything?
Sanner: It's not different than a lot of other presidents. I want to be clear about that. I think the difference for President Trump is that many presidents who did not take briefings – for example, President Clinton took almost no briefings — but he read. So you kind of want that backstop, of the President looking at it.
President Trump was never upset at me for disagreeing with him or telling him something that he didn't want to hear. I mean, certainly there were moments, just like with any president, where it's not the best briefing in the world that day. I had friends who briefed different presidents who had those awkward moments and difficult moments. But I always came back the next time. And there was never a problem when I walked in the door the next day. And I think that this is the idea, and it's in the statute itself, which says that the intelligence community is supposed to provide objective, timely, relevant intelligence without regard for policy preference.
So unlike anyone else that goes to see the president, you know that you are the person who needs to be delivering that uncomfortable truth or that difficult fact that didn't actually go that way. I called myself the skunk at the garden party and joked about it, because it's really the only way you can do it. Everybody else is incentivized to please. I was incentivized to say what other people didn't want to say.
In fact, with many people on his team, I thought of it as very much a team sport. [They said] Beth, are you gonna brief this today? Of course I'm gonna brief that. Good. I always got full support from everyone on the team, because they really wanted the president to get information.
And so it shocks me in a way that this team, I wouldn't say they didn't feel the same way, but maybe they don't have the appreciation of what this should be or what this is supposed to be, because it's actually in their interest. Maybe they don't want to have the “Hey, boss” conversation, but that's our job.
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The Cipher Brief: Mike Collins, head of the National Intelligence Council (NIC) recently lost his job and it appears that it was because the intelligence assessment he provided on an issue pertinent to Venezuela did not line up with policy. Is that an example of the same thing, do you think? Something they might not have wanted to hear?
Sanner: Sure. Yes, that is an uncomfortable assessment. And I noticed that National Security Advisor and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, when asked about it, he said, well, look, I agreed with the FBI position in that memo. And to me, this is why it's so good and important for the intelligence community to do the kind of work that that NIC memo did.
It laid out what they thought, why they thought that, and provided ample space for a dissenting opinion, for analysis that wasn't the agreement of everyone. And I think that's crucial because sometimes that dissenting view is correct, sometimes it's not. But generally what I found in my experience was that almost all of the recipients of PDBs and NIC products actually appreciated having those views even when they disagreed with them, because it helped them think.
The intelligence community is not like asking people to hit the easy button and the “I agree with you” button. That's not our role. Our role is to say what we think and why we think it. But also we have to have humility in that. The intelligence community isn't always right. But when done correctly and behind closed doors, I cannot understand why anybody would say that presenting an intelligence assessment that disagreed with policy needed to stop, or was an example of deep state. It's not. And it's really important.
The Cipher Brief: The news also came out last week that the PDB was being effectively moved out of CIA headquarters. Some of us might think, OK, that just sounds like an in-the-weeds bureaucratic reshuffle. Is it?
Sanner: As Deputy DNI for mission integration, mission integration meant two things for me. One was the intelligence community integration. And the second thing was to try to integrate the elements of the units that worked for me. And that included the mission managers, the National Intelligence Council, the PDB and the oversight group that did more technical things. I did not feel that those teams were collaborating enough.
So I would say that on one hand, the idea of bringing all these units together and having them collaborate more is actually a good thing on the face of it. I wanted the PDB folks to talk to the national intelligence officers because I wanted to double check – is this dissent that someone has, is this valid? What do you think about the evidence? Have we edited this correctly? Or is the line consistent with the previous line in terms of the analytic conclusions? So I wanted people to work together.
But the problem with moving the PDB is that it's a really complex ecosystem that is run by CIA. CIA is an executive agent. And people think they are just editors. It's not just editors. It's literally the technical part of it, the technical support for travel, the use of electronic media, the graphics people, the editors — all of that comes together at CIA headquarters. It is hard in some circumstances to do that without being in person. I do not know how the briefers, if they're sitting a mile, two miles down the street, how will they pick up their materials? How are they going to get their tablets? How is that all going to work?
My view here is that if anybody wants to put their thumb on the scale of analysis in the PDB, you do not need to move the PDB. That's not right. If they want to, they can just tell the briefer – which would not be right – don't brief that. Or when the briefer finishes, Tulsi Gabbard or [CIA Director John] Ratcliffe could chime in and say that they disagreed and think that that's not good analysis. There are lots of ways of putting your thumb on the scale. You don't need to move it. So this idea from the ODNI that it would allow them to respond more quickly to requests for information, that is an opposite world statement. It will make it harder, not easier.
I just think that they're not really understanding the technical part of this, even though I don't disagree with the idea of consolidation in terms of trying to get people to work more closely together as part of the ODNI.
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