REPORTS: Trump Does Not Read Daily National Security Briefings and Does Not Get Briefed on Russia if It Will Upset Him

President Not Briefed on ‘Russia-Related Intelligence That Might Draw Trump’s Ire’

In direct contrast to the past seven presidents, Donald Trump does not read the President’s Daily Brief, a highly-classified summarized collection of critical information amassed by the nation’s seventeen intelligence agencies and offices. The Washington Post on Friday reports instead of reading the PDB, President Trump relies on an oral presentation of select information from the specially-crafted document.

But a related Washington Post report from December noted the president’s intelligence briefers learned to not orally brief him on Russia-related intelligence matters, lest he get upset.

“Russia-related intelligence that might draw Trump’s ire is in some cases included only in the written assessment and not raised orally, said a former senior intelligence official familiar with the matter,” the Post reported on Dec. 14, 2017. The article was titled, “Doubting the intelligence, Trump pursues Putin and leaves a Russian threat unchecked.”

Friday’s Post report makes clear that Trump “rarely if ever reads the President’s Daily Brief, a document that lays out the most pressing information collected by U.S. intelligence agencies from hot spots around the world.”

Which means, if President Trump is not reading the PDB, and if Russia-related intelligence that might anger Trump “is in some cases included only in the written assessment,” the Commander-in-Chief is not being fully briefed, despite claims from intelligence officials to the contrary.

Director of national intelligence Daniel Coats told the Post in a statement, “any notion that President Trump is not fully engaged in the PDB or does not read the briefing materials is pure fiction and is clearly not based on firsthand knowledge of the process.”

That clashes with then Post’s current and prior reporting.

“Something will be missed,” former CIA Director and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta told the Post. “If for some reason his instincts on what should be done are not backed up by the intelligence because he hasn’t taken the time to read that intel, it increases the risk that he will make a mistake.”

Panetta is not the only one expressing concern.

President Trump is “really not getting a full intelligence briefing,” if he’s getting a shortened version or not being briefed on all the items in the PDB, former CIA assistant director Mark Lowenthal told the Post. “You need to get immersed in a story over its entire course. You can’t just jump into an issue and come up to speed on the actors and the implications. The odds are pretty good that something will arise later on for which he has no intelligence basis for helping him work through it.” 

Dan Pfeiffer, a former Senior Advisor to President Barack Obama sums it up clearly.

Image by The White House via Flickr