Latest news with #'sDailyBrief
Yahoo
12-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump reportedly shrugs off intelligence briefings he needs, but doesn't want
Among the many problems with Kash Patel's embarrassing tenure as FBI director is his willful ignorance. NBC News reported last week that while FBI directors have, for decades, attended a daily 8:30 a.m. 'director's brief,' but Patel is receiving these briefings only twice a week — in part because he kept failing to show up for work on time. He has also apparently abandoned a Wednesday afternoon teleconference meeting with bureau leaders in field offices. Two current FBI officials told NBC News that Patel's intelligence briefers have struggled to craft a briefing 'that captures his attention.' This is not, evidently, limited to the hapless FBI chief. Politico reported: Since President Donald Trump was sworn into office in January, he has sat for just 12 presentations from intelligence officials of the President's Daily Brief. That's a significant drop compared with Trump's first term in office, according to a POLITICO analysis of his public schedule. In much of his first term, Trump met with intel officials twice a week for the briefing, which provides the intelligence community's summary of the most pressing national security challenges facing the nation. Politico's report, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, added that the low number of briefings 'is troubling to many in and around the intelligence community, who were already concerned about Trump's act-first-evaluate-after approach to governing.' It's worth emphasizing that different presidents have approached these briefings in different ways. George W. Bush received intelligence briefings on a nearly daily basis. Barack Obama received briefings roughly every other day, but he was known to be a voracious reader of the written President's Daily Brief (often referred to as the PDB). Joe Biden received an in-person briefing once or twice a week, but like Obama, he was also known to read the PDB briefing book. Trump, meanwhile, reportedly doesn't read the PDB, and if the Politico report is accurate, he's receiving in-person briefings roughly once every 10 days. Broadly speaking, a couple of angles are worth keeping in mind in response to reporting like this. The first is probably obvious: Trump is dealing with serious national security challenges — war in Ukraine, a crisis in the Middle East, China expanding its global influence, domestic security threats, et al. — and the United States is being led by an incurious former television personality who desperately needs — but apparently isn't getting — valuable information that would lead to better decision-making. Less obvious, however, is the pattern: The problem isn't just that Trump is avoiding intelligence he needs; the problem is made worse by the fact that Trump has always avoided intelligence he needs. During his transition process in 2016, for example, Trump skipped nearly all of his intelligence briefings. Asked why, the Republican told Fox News in December 2016, 'Well, I get it when I need it. ... I don't have to be told — you know, I'm, like, a smart person.' As his inauguration drew closer, Trump acknowledged that he likes very short intelligence briefings. 'I like bullets, or I like as little as possible,' he explained in January 2017. Around the same time, he added, 'I don't need, you know, 200-page reports on something that can be handled on a page.' Things did not improve once he was in power. In early 2017, intelligence professionals went to great lengths to try to accommodate the president's toddler-like attention span, preparing reports 'with lots of graphics and maps.' National Security Council officials eventually learned that Trump was likely to stop reading important materials unless he saw his own name, so they included his name in 'as many paragraphs' as possible. In August 2017, The Washington Post had a piece on then-White House National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, who struggled to 'hold the attention of the president' during briefings on Afghanistan. The article noted, '[E]ven a single page of bullet points on the country seemed to tax the president's attention span on the subject.' A Trump confidant said at the time, 'I call the president the two-minute man. The president has patience for a half-page.' In February 2018, the Post reported that Trump 'rarely, if ever' read the PDB prepared for him. Months later, the Post had a separate report noting that the CIA and other agencies devoted enormous 'time, energy and resources' to ensuring that Trump received key intelligence, but 'his seeming imperviousness to such material often renders 'all of that a waste.'' In early 2020, the Post reported that Trump missed the early alarms on the Covid threat, in part because he 'routinely skips reading the PDB' and had 'little patience' for oral summaries of the intelligence. Exactly five years ago next week, The New York Times had a related report: The president veers off on tangents and getting him back on topic is difficult, they said. He has a short attention span and rarely, if ever, reads intelligence reports, relying instead on conservative media and his friends for information. He is unashamed to interrupt intelligence officers and riff based on tips or gossip. ... Mr. Trump rarely absorbs information that he disagrees with or that runs counter to his worldview, the officials said. Briefing him has been so great a challenge compared with his predecessors that the intelligence agencies have hired outside consultants to study how better to present information to him. It was an extraordinary revelation to consider: A sitting American president, in a time of multiple and dangerous crises, was so resistant to learning about security threats that his own country's intelligence officials have sought outside help to figure out how to get him to listen and focus. Or, put another way, Trump's indifference to intelligence is a problem, but it's not a new problem. This post updates our related earlier coverage. This article was originally published on
Yahoo
10-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump administration has tightly restricted access to president's daily intelligence brief
The Trump administration has tightly restricted the number of people who have access to President Donald Trump's highly classified daily intelligence report, five sources familiar with the move told CNN. Administration officials planned from the earliest days of Trump's second term to cut access to the so-called President's Daily Brief, or PDB — in part because during his first term, details from the report were sometimes leaked to the press, which contributed to the president's sense that the intelligence community was trying to undermine him. Initially, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles was personally approving who had access, one of the sources said. Now Tulsi Gabbard, who was sworn in as Trump's director of national intelligence in February, oversees the document and has taken responsibility for who has access. It's not unusual for new administrations to rejigger who has access to the PDB. And career intelligence officials responsible for putting it together typically approach a new administration to ask who should receive it and officials often move at first to limit access. But Trump, since he was first elected in 2016, has harbored a deep mistrust of the intelligence community, and in his second administration he has appointed officials who openly share his suspicions. Current and former officials say the move to limit access to the PDB comes against the backdrop of the president and his top officials' determination to quash leaks and bring to heel what they see as subversive elements within the intelligence community — highlighting what one US official described as 'ongoing large distrust issues.' That distrust — which reached its full expression in Trump's sense that the FBI's investigation into his 2016 campaign's ties to Russia was a politically-motivated 'witch hunt' and a 'hoax' — continues to reverberate in the administration's muscular approach to managing the intelligence community. Gabbard in particular has vowed publicly to 'aggressively [pursue] recent leakers' and 'clean house.' Former officials say shrinking access to the PDB is an equivocal move that might serve as a confidence-builder between the president and the community — but could also intensify divisions within the government and lead to a disorganized foreign policy, former officials familiar with the process said. 'There's a risk if you limit it too much you're not operating off the same page and you have disagreement in the administration on key issues,' one former intelligence official said. Hypothetically, 'you don't have (Secretary of State Marco) Rubio doing the same thing (special envoy to the Middle East Steve) Witkoff is doing.' CNN has asked the White House for comment. The PDB, which has existed in some form or another since the Kennedy administration, has been presented in different formats under different presidents, but it is widely regarded as one of the most important documents the US government produces, containing some of the most sensitive and up-to-date analysis it has. The general trend across several decades has been to widen dissemination, but there has been an ebb and flow from president to president. Richard Nixon, for example, had a very, very small dissemination list, at one point restricting his own defense secretary from accessing it, according to one former intelligence official. Some former officials insist that 'way too many people' were getting the PDB under Presidents Biden and Obama, with one saying, 'There are slimmed-down versions that are appropriate for most, but very few need what POTUS gets.' At least one proposal for overhauling the PDB that was circulated among senior Trump officials during the president's first days in office called for restricting access to the PDB to only a handful of very senior officials and limiting it to roughly 10 articles per day, one of the sources said. One of the sources said some agencies have been able to renegotiate access. There's a cachet to receiving it, several former officials said — no one likes to be left out, even if they don't have a strict 'need to know' reason to receive the document. 'Everybody wants to be a cool kid and get all the good stuff, to get what the president gets just so they can be part of the club,' the former official said. Just because senior officials don't receive the PDB doesn't mean they don't receive the intelligence it contains in some form or another. But if access to the PDB becomes too restricted, this person and another former intelligence official said, the White House risks a messy scenario in which senior officials are getting slightly different analytical interpretations of US intelligence. They won't be working from the operating picture and might respond inconsistently to foreign policy developments. That could put the United States at a disadvantage in sensitive negotiations, for example — a path Trump is currently pursuing with multiple US adversaries. Already, different Trump administration officials responsible for US foreign policy seem to be offering subtly different views of the administration's approach in public, in particular on tariffs, where Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett have articulated the strategy differently than White House trade adviser Peter Navarro. Access to the PDB is should be weighed: Shrinking it can give the president confidence that the intelligence analysis will be kept private and, ideally, allow him to consider the honest views of analysts without worrying about the politics of whatever the issue is. But it can also keep key people responsible for carrying out his policies in the dark about the United States' best assessments of its adversaries and the risks they pose to the country. 'I don't think in the theoretical it's bad, because it will give more freedom to the intelligence community because there will be less pressure to hold things back — they're going to be more able to tell POTUS if he's not worried Tom, Dick and Harry are reading it and it might leak,' the former official said. But the PDB 'level-sets for the entire national security team, so it's really important that everybody has a basic sense of what's going on,' that person said. The distrust between Trump and the sprawling intelligence community he now commands has simmered unabated since he was president-elect in 2017, and top Obama administration officials first briefed him on the intelligence community's conclusion that Russia had sought to intervene in the 2016 election on his behalf. The lesson Trump appeared to take away from his first administration — in which leaks, including of classified information, were rampant — was that the intelligence community was trying to weaponize its data and its analysis to undermine his administration. Trump's senior advisers attempted to similarly address issues with the PDB during his first term with a restricted briefing session called the Oval Office Intelligence briefing, that person said. Before the 2024 election, Trump refused to accept intelligence briefings traditionally offered to the major party candidates — in part because of leaks of PDB material during his first administration, one of the sources said. In his second term, he has moved aggressively to limit access to information about intelligence and policy deliberations to a small group of officials that the White House has deemed sufficiently loyal to the MAGA cause. That dynamic is particularly acute at the CIA, according to current and former US officials. There, the White House recently intervened to oust a longtime career official who had been slated to lead the agency's operational branch, according to current and former officials — an unusual move, because that post is usually determined by the agency itself. 'Things are very tightly held with innermost circle,' the US official said.
CNN
10-04-2025
- Politics
- CNN
Trump administration has tightly restricted access to president's daily intelligence brief
The Trump administration has tightly restricted the number of people who have access to President Donald Trump's highly classified daily intelligence report, five sources familiar with the move told CNN. Administration officials planned from the earliest days of Trump's second term to cut access to the so-called President's Daily Brief, or PDB — in part because during his first term, details from the report were sometimes leaked to the press, which contributed to the president's sense that the intelligence community was trying to undermine him. Initially, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles was personally approving who had access, one of the sources said. Now Tulsi Gabbard, who was sworn in as Trump's director of national intelligence in February, oversees the document and has taken responsibility for who has access. It's not unusual for new administrations to rejigger who has access to the PDB. And career intelligence officials responsible for putting it together typically approach a new administration to ask who should receive it and officials often move at first to limit access. But Trump, since he was first elected in 2016, has harbored a deep mistrust of the intelligence community, and in his second administration he has appointed officials who openly share his suspicions. Current and former officials say the move to limit access to the PDB comes against the backdrop of the president and his top officials' determination to quash leaks and bring to heel what they see as subversive elements within the intelligence community — highlighting what one US official described as 'ongoing large distrust issues.' That distrust — which reached its full expression in Trump's sense that the FBI's investigation into his 2016 campaign's ties to Russia was a politically-motivated 'witch hunt' and a 'hoax' — continues to reverberate in the administration's muscular approach to managing the intelligence community. Gabbard in particular has vowed publicly to 'aggressively [pursue] recent leakers' and 'clean house.' Former officials say shrinking access to the PDB is an equivocal move that might serve as a confidence-builder between the president and the community — but could also intensify divisions within the government and lead to a disorganized foreign policy, former officials familiar with the process said. 'There's a risk if you limit it too much you're not operating off the same page and you have disagreement in the administration on key issues,' one former intelligence official said. Hypothetically, 'you don't have (Secretary of State Marco) Rubio doing the same thing (special envoy to the Middle East Steve) Witkoff is doing.' CNN has asked the White House for comment. The PDB, which has existed in some form or another since the Kennedy administration, has been presented in different formats under different presidents, but it is widely regarded as one of the most important documents the US government produces, containing some of the most sensitive and up-to-date analysis it has. The general trend across several decades has been to widen dissemination, but there has been an ebb and flow from president to president. Richard Nixon, for example, had a very, very small dissemination list, at one point restricting his own defense secretary from accessing it, according to one former intelligence official. Some former officials insist that 'way too many people' were getting the PDB under Presidents Biden and Obama, with one saying, 'There are slimmed-down versions that are appropriate for most, but very few need what POTUS gets.' At least one proposal for overhauling the PDB that was circulated among senior Trump officials during the president's first days in office called for restricting access to the PDB to only a handful of very senior officials and limiting it to roughly 10 articles per day, one of the sources said. One of the sources said some agencies have been able to renegotiate access. There's a cachet to receiving it, several former officials said — no one likes to be left out, even if they don't have a strict 'need to know' reason to receive the document. 'Everybody wants to be a cool kid and get all the good stuff, to get what the president gets just so they can be part of the club,' the former official said. Just because senior officials don't receive the PDB doesn't mean they don't receive the intelligence it contains in some form or another. But if access to the PDB becomes too restricted, this person and another former intelligence official said, the White House risks a messy scenario in which senior officials are getting slightly different analytical interpretations of US intelligence. They won't be working from the operating picture and might respond inconsistently to foreign policy developments. That could put the United States at a disadvantage in sensitive negotiations, for example — a path Trump is currently pursuing with multiple US adversaries. Already, different Trump administration officials responsible for US foreign policy seem to be offering subtly different views of the administration's approach in public, in particular on tariffs, where Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett have articulated the strategy differently than White House trade adviser Peter Navarro. Access to the PDB is should be weighed: Shrinking it can give the president confidence that the intelligence analysis will be kept private and, ideally, allow him to consider the honest views of analysts without worrying about the politics of whatever the issue is. But it can also keep key people responsible for carrying out his policies in the dark about the United States' best assessments of its adversaries and the risks they pose to the country. 'I don't think in the theoretical it's bad, because it will give more freedom to the intelligence community because there will be less pressure to hold things back — they're going to be more able to tell POTUS if he's not worried Tom, Dick and Harry are reading it and it might leak,' the former official said. But the PDB 'level-sets for the entire national security team, so it's really important that everybody has a basic sense of what's going on,' that person said. The distrust between Trump and the sprawling intelligence community he now commands has simmered unabated since he was president-elect in 2017, and top Obama administration officials first briefed him on the intelligence community's conclusion that Russia had sought to intervene in the 2016 election on his behalf. The lesson Trump appeared to take away from his first administration — in which leaks, including of classified information, were rampant — was that the intelligence community was trying to weaponize its data and its analysis to undermine his administration. Trump's senior advisers attempted to similarly address issues with the PDB during his first term with a restricted briefing session called the Oval Office Intelligence briefing, that person said. Before the 2024 election, Trump refused to accept intelligence briefings traditionally offered to the major party candidates — in part because of leaks of PDB material during his first administration, one of the sources said. In his second term, he has moved aggressively to limit access to information about intelligence and policy deliberations to a small group of officials that the White House has deemed sufficiently loyal to the MAGA cause. That dynamic is particularly acute at the CIA, according to current and former US officials. There, the White House recently intervened to oust a longtime career official who had been slated to lead the agency's operational branch, according to current and former officials — an unusual move, because that post is usually determined by the agency itself. 'Things are very tightly held with innermost circle,' the US official said.
CNN
10-04-2025
- Politics
- CNN
Trump administration has tightly restricted access to president's daily intelligence brief
The Trump administration has tightly restricted the number of people who have access to President Donald Trump's highly classified daily intelligence report, five sources familiar with the move told CNN. Administration officials planned from the earliest days of Trump's second term to cut access to the so-called President's Daily Brief, or PDB — in part because during his first term, details from the report were sometimes leaked to the press, which contributed to the president's sense that the intelligence community was trying to undermine him. Initially, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles was personally approving who had access, one of the sources said. Now Tulsi Gabbard, who was sworn in as Trump's director of national intelligence in February, oversees the document and has taken responsibility for who has access. It's not unusual for new administrations to rejigger who has access to the PDB. And career intelligence officials responsible for putting it together typically approach a new administration to ask who should receive it and officials often move at first to limit access. But Trump, since he was first elected in 2016, has harbored a deep mistrust of the intelligence community, and in his second administration he has appointed officials who openly share his suspicions. Current and former officials say the move to limit access to the PDB comes against the backdrop of the president and his top officials' determination to quash leaks and bring to heel what they see as subversive elements within the intelligence community — highlighting what one US official described as 'ongoing large distrust issues.' That distrust — which reached its full expression in Trump's sense that the FBI's investigation into his 2016 campaign's ties to Russia was a politically-motivated 'witch hunt' and a 'hoax' — continues to reverberate in the administration's muscular approach to managing the intelligence community. Gabbard in particular has vowed publicly to 'aggressively [pursue] recent leakers' and 'clean house.' Former officials say shrinking access to the PDB is an equivocal move that might serve as a confidence-builder between the president and the community — but could also intensify divisions within the government and lead to a disorganized foreign policy, former officials familiar with the process said. 'There's a risk if you limit it too much you're not operating off the same page and you have disagreement in the administration on key issues,' one former intelligence official said. Hypothetically, 'you don't have (Secretary of State Marco) Rubio doing the same thing (special envoy to the Middle East Steve) Witkoff is doing.' CNN has asked the White House for comment. The PDB, which has existed in some form or another since the Kennedy administration, has been presented in different formats under different presidents, but it is widely regarded as one of the most important documents the US government produces, containing some of the most sensitive and up-to-date analysis it has. The general trend across several decades has been to widen dissemination, but there has been an ebb and flow from president to president. Richard Nixon, for example, had a very, very small dissemination list, at one point restricting his own defense secretary from accessing it, according to one former intelligence official. Some former officials insist that 'way too many people' were getting the PDB under Presidents Biden and Obama, with one saying, 'There are slimmed-down versions that are appropriate for most, but very few need what POTUS gets.' At least one proposal for overhauling the PDB that was circulated among senior Trump officials during the president's first days in office called for restricting access to the PDB to only a handful of very senior officials and limiting it to roughly 10 articles per day, one of the sources said. One of the sources said some agencies have been able to renegotiate access. There's a cachet to receiving it, several former officials said — no one likes to be left out, even if they don't have a strict 'need to know' reason to receive the document. 'Everybody wants to be a cool kid and get all the good stuff, to get what the president gets just so they can be part of the club,' the former official said. Just because senior officials don't receive the PDB doesn't mean they don't receive the intelligence it contains in some form or another. But if access to the PDB becomes too restricted, this person and another former intelligence official said, the White House risks a messy scenario in which senior officials are getting slightly different analytical interpretations of US intelligence. They won't be working from the operating picture and might respond inconsistently to foreign policy developments. That could put the United States at a disadvantage in sensitive negotiations, for example — a path Trump is currently pursuing with multiple US adversaries. Already, different Trump administration officials responsible for US foreign policy seem to be offering subtly different views of the administration's approach in public, in particular on tariffs, where Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett have articulated the strategy differently than White House trade adviser Peter Navarro. Access to the PDB is should be weighed: Shrinking it can give the president confidence that the intelligence analysis will be kept private and, ideally, allow him to consider the honest views of analysts without worrying about the politics of whatever the issue is. But it can also keep key people responsible for carrying out his policies in the dark about the United States' best assessments of its adversaries and the risks they pose to the country. 'I don't think in the theoretical it's bad, because it will give more freedom to the intelligence community because there will be less pressure to hold things back — they're going to be more able to tell POTUS if he's not worried Tom, Dick and Harry are reading it and it might leak,' the former official said. But the PDB 'level-sets for the entire national security team, so it's really important that everybody has a basic sense of what's going on,' that person said. The distrust between Trump and the sprawling intelligence community he now commands has simmered unabated since he was president-elect in 2017, and top Obama administration officials first briefed him on the intelligence community's conclusion that Russia had sought to intervene in the 2016 election on his behalf. The lesson Trump appeared to take away from his first administration — in which leaks, including of classified information, were rampant — was that the intelligence community was trying to weaponize its data and its analysis to undermine his administration. Trump's senior advisers attempted to similarly address issues with the PDB during his first term with a restricted briefing session called the Oval Office Intelligence briefing, that person said. Before the 2024 election, Trump refused to accept intelligence briefings traditionally offered to the major party candidates — in part because of leaks of PDB material during his first administration, one of the sources said. In his second term, he has moved aggressively to limit access to information about intelligence and policy deliberations to a small group of officials that the White House has deemed sufficiently loyal to the MAGA cause. That dynamic is particularly acute at the CIA, according to current and former US officials. There, the White House recently intervened to oust a longtime career official who had been slated to lead the agency's operational branch, according to current and former officials — an unusual move, because that post is usually determined by the agency itself. 'Things are very tightly held with innermost circle,' the US official said.
Fox News
10-04-2025
- Politics
- Fox News
I helped Biden defend against national security threats. NSA needs skilled leaders not politics
The first thing I read each morning for the last four years was the top-secret President's Daily Brief – a summary of the most sensitive intelligence and analysis on global issues. From the president on down to cabinet members and other senior officials, we relied on that summary to warn us about China's aggressive cyber operations, terrorist plots, Iran's malicious activities, and other geopolitical risks. Invariably, these insights were derived mostly from intelligence collected by one entity: the National Security Agency. Why? Because in a world defined by digital communications and technology, the NSA is America's most effective intelligence service. That's why the abrupt firings a few days ago of NSA Director Gen. Timothy Haugh and Deputy Director Wendy Noble – two highly experienced and apolitical leaders – at a time when the U.S. is facing unprecedented cyberattacks from China and others is a gift to our adversaries. As President Donald Trump considers replacements for these vital roles, he and his national security team would be well-served to prioritize competence and leadership over politics. Here's why. First, the NSA director and deputy director roles are unique in the U.S. government. Unlike the heads of other departments and agencies, who are primarily charged with overseeing policy, interfacing with external stakeholders and managing the workforce – all important tasks – they don't need to be substantive experts to lead the agency. Not so at the NSA. By virtue of the highly technical nature of cyber operations and signals intelligence activities – intercepting the communications of our adversaries – it's imperative that NSA leaders understand both the technical details and the strategic implications of the complex operations under their command. They need to know how to build and deploy software platforms and code to launch cyber operations. They need to understand the cryptologic issues and programs that enable intelligence collection and harden U.S. defenses against cyberattacks. They also need to understand the immense power of the capabilities under their control. The horrific leaks by Edward Snowden illustrated the geopolitical consequences associated with expansive NSA operations even when you have competent professionals leading the agency. It's no job for amateurs. This is precisely why presidents since NSA's inception in 1952 have always selected leaders with deep technical expertise to run this highly sophisticated agency. Just as we need qualified doctors overseeing the emergency room of a hospital, we need competent, qualified leaders at the NSA. Second, the decapitation of NSA leadership came at a time when China is undertaking increasingly aggressive cyber operations against the United States, as evidenced by the recent Salt Typhoon cyberattacks against US telecommunications networks. As Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard stated last month, "Beijing is advancing its cyber capabilities for sophisticated operations aimed at stealing sensitive U.S. government and private sector information, and pre-positioning additional asymmetric attack options that may be deployed in a conflict." These are not abstract threats. Turmoil at the NSA – the agency principally responsible for detecting and countering Chinese cyber espionage – could not have come at a worse time. The unprecedented firings, apparently without cause, will have a chilling effect on the workforce and morale at the agency and signal that politics is more important than apolitical, objective analysis and production that has always defined the intelligence profession. The impacts will be further amplified if other senior NSA officials retire or leave for more lucrative positions in industry to avoid becoming the next victim of baseless political attacks. The ultimate beneficiaries of chaos at America's most consequential spy agency will be America's adversaries, who will look to exploit the crisis. The Trump administration has an opportunity to minimize the damage caused by these firings by selecting professionals with the competence and experience to lead NSA moving forward. This isn't about politics, or at least it shouldn't be. All Americans should care about having the best and brightest leading the NSA at a time when we're facing rising threats at home and abroad – from China and Iran to ISIS and drug cartels. Choosing otherwise is a dangerous proposition that benefits only our adversaries.
