Briefings
switched from a printed PDB to an electronic one at the request of 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?”
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 Monday amid the escalating controversy of whether Trump knew about the Russian bounty report.
The New York Times 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 he briefed Trump on the intelligence assessment in March 2019.
McCaul: Threat not ‘credible’
Like his predecessors, Trump 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 Beth Sanner, who was appointed deputy director of national intelligence for mission integration in May 2019.
Trump rarely seemed to absorb the information even when he was orally briefed, according to Bolton’s 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 wrote.
Experts said 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 it and had not it passed on.”
Texas Rep. Michael McCaul, the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said the intelligence about potential Russian bounties was probably included in the president’s daily brief but not conveyed to Trump in a formal threat briefing because it wasn’t “actionable.”
“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.”
‘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. 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 to retaliatory action or another major policy decision.
Spanberger and others said any information in the president’s daily brief must be deemed urgent and credible. 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.
Sen. Todd Young, R-Ind., 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 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, R-Neb., 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 said 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 in a tweet that whether Trump was briefed or not, “we all know now.”
The real question, she said, is “how are we going to act” on the information?