In skipping daily briefings, Trump shows ambivalence toward intel agencies
WASHINGTON — Donald Trump's reluctance to receive daily intelligence briefings — and his blunt rejection of the CIA's assessment of Russian involvement in the 2016 presidential election — suggest a rocky start to the president-elect's relationship with intelligence agencies.
Since the election, Trump has received the President's Daily Briefing only four times, amid meetings with potential Cabinet secretaries and other transition business. And on Sunday, the president-elect suggested that the rate of briefings won't change once he's sworn in next month.
"I get it when I need it," Trump told Fox News Sunday. "I'm a smart person. I don't have to be told the same thing in the same words every single day for the next eight years."
Trump's cool attitude toward intelligence comes amid a debate over whether the hacking of Democratic emails during the presidential campaign may have been an effort by Russia to get him elected. President Obama has ordered an intelligence report before he leaves office, and a growing group of Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill is calling for an investigation into that question. But Trump said Sunday there's no consensus by the intelligence community on the issue.
"They're not sure. They're fighting among themselves. They're not sure," he said. "It could be Russia. I don't really think it is, but who knows? I don't know either. They don't know and I don't know."
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Trump dismisses CIA findings of Russian election tampering
In his interview with Chris Wallace of Fox News Sunday, Trump was more measured than the Friday night statement that seemed to question the competence of the CIA, after the Washington Post, citing anonymous sources, said the agency had concluded the Russians were working to get him elected. "These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction," the Trump transition said in a statement to reporters.
But Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said Saturday that Trump was attempting to "minimize or dismiss" intelligence assessments finding that Russia interfered in the presidential election by hacking the emails of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman.
"Even more damaging are comments that impugn the tens of thousands of Americans who are at work every day of the year, many in great physical danger, to protect us and to provide our national leadership — regardless of political party — with the best information possible," Schiff said. He urged Trump to visit the CIA headquarters to look at the rows of memorial stars in the lobby, each representing an anonymous CIA agent killed in the line of duty, "and reflect on his disparagement of the intelligence community's work."
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Trump suggested that he'll bring in different people to brief him when he's president. "I've made changes, you know, at the top. I mean, we're going to have different people coming in, because we have our people. They have their people, and I have great respect for them," he said.
Trump has announced his intent to nominate Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Kan., as director of the CIA, but another top post — director of national intelligence — remains unfilled. That's the person responsible for assembling and presenting intelligence briefings to the president and president-elect.
Trump's infrequent briefings are a departure from every modern president except Richard Nixon, who was so skeptical of intelligence agencies that he refused to accept the briefings offered by President Lyndon Johnson — even returning envelopes containing classified material to the CIA unopened. Instead, Nixon delegated the daily briefing almost entirely to his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger.
"What’s happened more often is that the presidents coming in — even those who have been somewhat skeptical — become voracious readers of the product," said David Priess, the author of The President's Book of Secrets: The Untold Story of Intelligence Briefings to America's Presidents from Kennedy to Obama. "They've started seeing the kind of top-secret analysis, the intelligence collection, the covert operations, and they've seen a real value to it."
But the daily face time with the incoming commander-in-chief can also help improve the quality and value of the work of the intelligence community, said Priess, a former CIA intelligence officer.
"The idea being that the intelligence community has no other purpose than to be useful to the president," he said. "There's certainly a marketing element to this. The intelligence community wants to put its best face forward. But their primary mission is to reduce the uncertainty for the decisions that the president is going to have to make. And in order to do that, they need to know what information the president needs, and how he wants to receive it."
That transition is even more important in cases where, like Trump, the president-elect comes with little experience in intelligence.
"The background and attitudes the president-elect brings with him obviously are powerful variables in determining the extent to which the (intelligence community's) effort will succeed," wrote John Helgerson, the former CIA inspector general, in an internal CIA book titled, Getting to Know the President. "It is quite a different matter, for example, to establish a relationship with an individual who has moved up from the vice presidency in the way that Presidents Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush did, as contrasted with individuals who have come to the position with no Washington experience."
And if the president-elect harbors a grudge or becomes disillusioned with intelligence, Helgerson said, the job becomes that much more difficult.
The morning after election day, a team of intelligence analysts from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence were in New York, ready to give an intelligence briefing to the newly determined president-elect.
It would be a week before Trump would receive them, and since then Trump has been receiving the daily briefings at the rate of once a week — all on Tuesdays, his transition office has acknowledged.
Trump said he can still be briefed on "fluid situations" as the need arises. "I say, 'If something should change from this point, immediately call me. I'm available on one-minute's notice,'" he says he's told intelligence briefers.
He's also quick to note that Vice President-elect Mike Pence has been receiving independent daily briefings. That's a departure from the Obama-Biden model, where the president and vice president often sit in on the same Oval Office briefing when both are in Washington.
Trump now has full access to Obama's intelligence 'book'
The PDB isn't the only avenue for the president-elect to be looped in on current intelligence, and White House press secretary Josh Earnest said last week that President Obama was doing everything in his power to ensure Trump's team is being brought up to speed.
"The president-elect has designated a landing team to work closely with the National Security Council and the Department of Defense and other national security agencies to effect a smooth transition. So that certainly is a potential mechanism for providing insight into those decisions," he said. Earnest also suggested that national security issues might be passed along president-to-president, as part of the frequent phone calls between Obama and Trump since the election.
Trump's rate of briefings is ironic given that Trump's closest supporters have been critical of the frequency with which Obama received briefings. The Government Accountability Institute, a conservative think tank founded by Trump chief strategist Stephen Bannon, conducted a 2014 study showing Obama had a briefing on his schedule only 42% of the time. (The analysis included weekends and holidays, and did not account for days when Obama read the PDB but wasn't briefed in person.)
That study was picked up by Bannon's conservative web site Breitbart News, which called the numbers "alarming."
Daily, in-person intelligence briefings "allow the Commander-in-Chief the chance for critical followup, feedback, questions, and the challenging of flawed intelligence assumptions," Breitbart wrote.
And Trump himself — apparently responding to that story — alleged that Obama wasn't reading the written intelligence reports, either. (The White House has said he does, even when he doesn't have a scheduled in-person briefing.)
"Fact — Obama does not read his intelligence briefings nor does he get briefed in person by the CIA or DOD. Too busy I guess!" Trump tweeted in 2014.