What to know about how Trump gets, or doesn't get, intelligence briefings

WASHINGTON – It’s a highly classified dossier outlining the most urgent and credible national security threats of the day. And that top-secret document is suddenly in the spotlight.

The president’s daily intelligence brief, or PDB, is now at the center of a firestorm over reports that Russia offered bounties to Taliban militants to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan.

The White House spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany said Monday that President Donald Trump was not "personally briefed" on intelligence about the alleged Russian operation.

But McEnany would not say whether that explosive information was relayed to Trump in his daily written intelligence briefing, which he does not usually read, according to multiple media reports. McEnany on Tuesday disputed assertions that Trump doesn't read his daily intelligence briefings. 

She also said there are disagreements among U.S. intelligence officials about the credibility of the Russian bounty intelligence, in trying to explain why Trump was not orally told about it.

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So what is the presidential daily brief? And how does Trump get his intelligence information, if he does not always read the written digest delivered to him every day?  

PDB: Customized to how a president absorbs information

According to the CIA, the PDB has been presented to every president since Feb. 15, 1946, when then-President Harry Truman received what was then known as "the Daily Summary," chock full of secret warnings and classified insights about the most urgent threats against the United States.

The format is customized to each new president – to match reading preferences and the way information is absorbed. 

"Some presidents prefer to have it all told to them, some prefer to read it," said Abigail Spanberger, a former CIA officer and now Democratic congresswoman. "It's really an issue of how does the consumer – in this case the president – get the information that's necessary."

Presidents are also assigned a briefer who becomes accustomed to the desired format and can anticipate what questions the commander-in-chief might ask.

In the current administration, the written PDB can be anywhere from 18 to 75 pages, depending on what is going on in the world at a particular time, said two administration officials speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters. The report is divided into specific issue areas, such as COVID-19 or Afghanistan, and often includes charts, graphs, and bullet points.

The written briefing is distributed across the government, and more than 100 people beyond Trump can have access to it, from the Pentagon to the State Department, the officials said.

The intelligence community presents conclusions in the written PDB with different degrees of confidence, from low to high, officials said. 

Only items that carry a high degree of confidence are presented in person to the president, and that did not include reports that Russia may be paying bounties for the deaths of U.S. soldiers.

Officials declined to say whether Trump read about that allegation in the PDB, or how closely he reads the documents in general. They did say there are government officials who do not believe there is enough evidence to prove that Russia is actually paying bounties. They did not specify who those officials are or how many there are.

Trump’s primary briefer is Beth Sanner, who carries the title of Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Mission Integration. Officials said the president also talks intelligence matters with department heads such as National Security Adviser Robert O'Brien and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

To produce the PDB, intelligence officials work through the night to sift through a constantly churning stream of intelligence information and determine what the president needs to know.

"Then the PDB briefers come in in the very wee hours of the morning to get themselves up to speed on what's in it" and prepare themselves to present it to the president, said Carol Rollie Flynn, a 30-year CIA veteran. The PDB also usually goes to the president's top national security advisers, such as his secretaries of defense and state.

Former President George W. Bush took the printed copy and then had his briefer walk him through it, Flynn said.

"He liked to have his full team there, so it was a real conversation every day," said Flynn, who is now with the Foreign Policy Research Institute. 

In 2014, intelligence officials switched from a printed PDB to an electronic one at the request of then-President Barack Obama, according to a CIA history of the PDB. 

Robert Cardillo, a former intelligence official and PDB briefer in the Obama administration, said he considered two questions when assembling the president’s daily brief: "Does the president need to know this? And if the answer's yes, does the president need to know this now?”

Cardillo said Obama wanted his PDB delivered by 6 am. He would read it then and have an oral briefing on the material a few hours later.

The main PDB is usually less than 20 pages long, according to David Priess, a former CIA officer and presidential briefer who served in the  Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations.

"And for 55 years, *every* POTUS (possibly excepting of Nixon) has read it," Priess tweeted on Monday amid the escalating controversy of whether Trump knew about the Russian bounty report.

The New York Times has reported that intelligence information outlining the Russian bounty operation was included in Trump's PDB in February. The Associated Press reported that Trump's former national security adviser, John Bolton, told colleagues that he briefed Trump on the intelligence assessment in March 2019.

McCaul: No formal briefing because threat not 'credible, actionable' 

Like his predecessors, Trump also gets regular in-person briefings from members of the intelligence community. This is Trump's preferred method of getting intelligence information, and it happens about two or three times a week, according to daily schedules released by the White House. 

Trump is often briefed by Sanner, who was appointed deputy director of national intelligence for mission integration in May 2019. 

Trump rarely seemed to absorb the intelligence information even when he was orally briefed, according to Bolton's new book, "The Room Where It Happened," released last week.

“Trump generally had only two intelligence briefings per week, and in most of those, he spoke at greater length than the briefers, often on matters completely unrelated to the subjects at hand,” Bolton writes in the book.

Experts say that U.S. intelligence officials should have alerted Trump to the Russia bounty intelligence in whatever form he prefers, given the grave threat to American troops in the field. 

Cardillo said intelligence officials have what’s called a “duty to warn” if they come upon information that American lives are at risk from a foreign actor. That means, he said, that information goes up the chain “almost immediately” and often without being fully vetted because it’s so important.

Frank Kendall, a former undersecretary for Defense, said it would be "career-ending" for an intelligence official not to relay that kind of information.

“When soldiers’ lives are at stake, there's a very strong burden and a very high priority” to relay that information, Kendall said. “And not providing that sort of information would be at least career-ending for people if it was found out later on that they had it and had not it passed on.”

As with warnings about the coronavirus pandemic, it seems to have fallen through the cracks, said John Gans, author of "White House Warriors: How the National Security Council Transformed the American Way of War."

"The hints of threats are being seen, warnings are being sounded, but neither the president nor anyone else are heeding them," said John Gans, author of "White House Warriors: How the National Security Council Transformed the American Way of War."

Rep. Michael McCaul, the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said the intelligence about potential Russian bounties was likely included in the president's daily brief but not conveyed to Trump in a formal threat briefing because it wasn't yet "actionable." McCaul made the remarks to NBC, and his office confirmed them with USA TODAY.

"I think the way the process works is that he (Trump) gets briefed about three times a week on sort of actionable, credible items," McCaul told NBC. "And the decision was made that this was not at that point in time a credible, actionable piece of intelligence. And if at any point it did, it would be raised to his attention."

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Intelligence gathering is like 'putting together a tapestry'

Flynn said it's no surprise if there were disagreements among U.S. intelligence agencies and analysts about the reliability of the information about Russia's alleged operation. 

"What happens a lot when you get this kind of information, it's fragmentary," she said. "You get a little bit from one person, a little bit from another, maybe a little bit from an intercept. And you're kind of putting it together like a tapestry, and usually there's some holes here and there." 

She said it sounds like that is what happened with the Russian bounty intelligence. And because it's so alarming and provocative, she said, "you want to be really careful that you don't give it more credibility than it deserves." 

She noted that once such information is relayed to the president, it could lead retaliatory action or another major policy decision. 

But Spanberger and others said any information in the president's daily brief must be deemed urgent and credible. And if that's the case with the Russian bounty information – and intelligence officials knew Trump would not read the PDB – then they should have told the president directly about it.

Republican Sen. Todd Young, who sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he was "alarmed" that Trump was not briefed on the intelligence information. He suggested intelligence officials should be held "accountable for their gross negligence" for failing to alert the president, and he called for congressional hearings to probe the Russia allegations.

"We must work to ascertain the reliability of media reports and, where necessary, advance accountability within our own government and facilitate a punishing response to the seemingly immoral, illegal, and unconscionable actions of the dictator who lords over the Russian people," Young, of Indiana, said in a statement Monday.

This report in particular should have been flagged for Trump because of the importance of U.S.-Russian relations and the potential threat to American military personnel, said Sen. Ben Sasse, a Nebraska Republican who sits on the Senate intelligence committee.

"What we’re talking about here is putting the target crosshairs on the backs of American servicemen and women in uniform," Sasse told reporters Monday. He said Congress should be focused on two questions:  "No. 1, Who knew what, when, and did the commander-in-chief know? And if not, how the hell not?"

Spanberger said whether Trump was briefed or not, "we all know now," as she put in in a tweet. So the real question, she said, is "how are we going to act" on the information?

What we know:Russia reportedly offered bounty on US troops in Afghanistan.