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The President's Daily Brief (PDB), sometimes referred to as the President's Daily Briefing or the President's Daily Bulletin, is a top secret document produced and given each morning to the President of the United States. Producing and presenting the brief is the responsibility of the Director of National Intelligence, whose office is tasked with fusing intelligence from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the National Security Agency (NSA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and other members of the U.S. Intelligence Community. The Brief is also produced for the President-elect of the United States, between election day and inauguration.
Contents
Purpose and history
The PDB is intended to provide the president of the United States with new intelligence warranting attention and analysis of sensitive international situations. The prototype of the PDB was termed the President's Intelligence Check List (PICL); the first was produced by CIA officer Richard Lehman at the direction of Huntington D. Sheldon on June 17, 1961.
Although the production and coordination of the PDB was a CIA responsibility, other members of the U.S. Intelligence Community reviewed articles (the "coordination" process) and were free to write and submit articles for inclusion.
While the name of the PDB implies exclusivity, it has historically been briefed to other high officials. The distribution list has varied over time, but has always or almost always included the Secretaries of State and Defense and the National Security Advisor. Rarely, special editions of the PDB have actually been "for the President's eyes only," with further dissemination of the information left to the President's discretion.
Production of the PDB is associated with that of another publication, historically known as the National Intelligence Daily, that includes many of the same items but is distributed considerably more widely than the PDB.
Political importance
Former Central Intelligence Director George Tenet considered the PDB so sensitive that during July 2000 he indicated to the National Archives and Records Administration that none of them could be released for publication "no matter how old or historically significant it may be."
During a briefing on May 21, 2002, Ari Fleischer, former White House Press Secretary, characterized the PDB as "the most highly sensitized classified document in the government."
On Sept. 16, 2015, CIA Director John Brennan spoke at the LBJ Library, at the public release of a total of 2,500 daily briefs and intelligence checklists from the Kennedy and Johnson presidencies. The release was a reversal of the government's previous stance in legal briefs attempting to keep the PDB indefinitely classified. On Aug. 24, 2016, CIA released a further 2,500 briefs from the Nixon and Ford presidencies at a symposium held at the Nixon Library.
Public awareness
The PDB was scrutinized by news media during testimony to the 9/11 Commission, which was convened during 2004 to analyze the September 11, 2001 attacks. On April 8, 2004, after a testimony by then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, the Commission renewed calls for the declassification of a PDB from August 6, 2001, entitled Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US. Two days later, the White House complied and released the document with redaction.
Usage by presidents and presidents-elect
During the 2012 re-election campaign, a former Bush administration official and President Barack Obama critic reported that "officials tell me the former president [Bush] held his intelligence meeting six days a week, no exceptions" (for a putative 86% in-person attendance record) though "Bush records [were] not yet available electronically for analysis". Obama records, by contrast in this analysis, showed that during "his first 1,225 days in office, Obama attended his PDB just 536 times — or 43.8 percent of the time. During 2011 and the first half of 2012 [within the 1,225 days analyzed], his attendance ... [fell] to just over 38 percent."
In the first six weeks of the presidential transition of Donald Trump in 2016, the President-elect averaged about one PDB a week. He had "participated in multiple PDBs in some weeks, CNN has learned. And the transition team said last week Trump would be increasing his PDB participation to three times a week." In mid-December 2016, the CIA website said President Obama had initiated electronic delivery of the written brief in 2014 and that he received it six days a week.