The President’s Daily Brief and Presidents-Elect: A Primer

Incoming U.S. presidents inherit institutions to help them gain insight into the capabilities and intentions of global competitors. These tools include the President’s Daily Brief, or PDB, which contains the nation’s most sensitive intelligence reporting and analysis.

The president-elect’s toolkit overlaps with that of the president. For more than 50 years, components of the intelligence community have delivered the top-secret PDB to the commander in chief every working day. Along with other support, the PDB helps the president remain the world’s best-informed person on a wide range of national security challenges.

A president-elect is normally brought into this briefing process early in the transition to support a smooth transfer of power and to avoid national security vulnerabilities on or after inauguration. But not this year. Joe Biden, despite his wide recognition as president-elect, is not yet seeing the PDB.

1. Why isn’t the intelligence community sharing the President’s Daily Brief with Biden?

Because President Trump hasn’t authorized it. And the distribution of the PDB is at the sole discretion of the current president.

In the absence of a presidential nod to begin such provision of the PDB, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) declared last week that it would begin providing intelligence support to the president-elect once the administrator of the General Services Administration (GSA) formally “ascertain[ed]” Biden as the president-elect. An ODNI spokesperson told NBC News that it “follows the statutory direction provided in the Presidential Transition Act, which requires ascertainment of the candidate by the administrator of GSA prior to supporting a potential presidential transition.”

The updated Presidential Transition Act does not even mention the PDB—the distribution of which is at the sole discretion of the president. Trump could, at any time, authorize the ODNI to start giving the PDB to Biden regardless of whether the GSA administrator ascertains Biden to be the president-elect. Without any order from Trump to start giving the highly controlled document to Biden, it’s understandable that ODNI officials are waiting for the GSA administrator’s decision. But here’s where it gets tricky for the ODNI: Theoretically, the president could also prevent the ODNI from allowing the president-elect to see the PDB even after such an ascertainment.

2. But haven’t previous presidents-elect seen the President’s Daily Brief during the transition?

Yes, they have—when they’ve wanted to look at it.

The CIA created the President’s Daily Brief in December 1964 for Lyndon Johnson. Starting with the first regular transfer of power thereafter in 1968, every outgoing president has provided a same-day copy of the highly restricted document to the president-elect at a location of the latter’s choosing to prepare him, during the short transition, for the myriad national security threats and opportunities he will face.

It hasn’t always been smooth. During the inaugural offering of the PDB to a president-elect in 1968, for example, CIA officers failed to get face-to-face access to Richard Nixon. So they did the next best thing, dutifully delivering a sealed copy of the PDB every working morning to Nixon’s secretary in his transition office. Feedback about the effort finally came as inauguration drew near: Nixon’s team delivered a towering stack of the previous two months’ PDB envelopes—all unopened. Nixon had instead discussed intelligence matters with National Security Adviser-designate Henry Kissinger, who was getting extensive intelligence support from the same CIA team trying to get to Nixon.

Intelligence officers assigned to transition duty for Nixon’s successors had greater success gaining entrée to each president-elect. Without fail, every incoming commander in chief has taken advantage of the opportunity to get up to speed on the most exclusive intelligence assessments by reading or being briefed about the contents of the outgoing president’s PDBs.

3. Have we ever seen a delay like this one?

Yes, but only under quite different circumstances.

Several presidents-elect, despite convincing election wins, didn’t start seeing the President’s Daily Brief immediately after Election Day. One difference from the present moment, however: Those delays came not because the outgoing president refused to make it available, but due to competing priorities and busy schedules in the early days of the president-elects’ transitions.

Bill Clinton, for example, didn’t take his first PDB briefing until 10 days after the election. But after that, his intense interest in the classified material prompted intelligence sessions almost daily in Little Rock, Arkansas. Clinton even decided to expand the range of issues in what would become his own daily book of secrets. “I became convinced early on that economics was going to be increasingly tied to security, and a part of that would be environmental issues,” he told me. “So Al Gore and I asked the CIA to include in the PDB any salient information on economic developments and environmental developments.”

And then there was the election debacle of 2000. After the most closely contested election in modern history, in November 2000, one important question stopped Clinton from following tradition and bringing the president-elect into the PDB circle right after the election: Who had won? Democratic Party candidate Al Gore continued to receive the PDB each morning, as he had for eight years as vice president, but Republican Party candidate and Texas Governor George W. Bush—who appeared to have won the popular vote in Florida and, with it, the Electoral College—was kept out of the loop.

As the days without a formal resolution to the election drama stretched into weeks, pressure mounted on Clinton to start sharing the most sensitive intelligence, even before the Supreme Court rendered a judgment on the election recount. “We decided that the clock was ticking too much,” then-White House Chief of Staff John Podesta told me. “We needed to get him into the system.” Clinton authorized the CIA to start giving Bush the same intelligence that the president received each day—the first time in history that a presidential candidate started receiving the PDB before being universally acknowledged as the winner.

More recently, the Obama administration announced right after the 2016 election that Trump would immediately have access to the brief, and intelligence officers stood ready in New York on Election Day to support the new president-elect. Trump took briefings from intelligence officers about the PDB’s content, albeit les

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