Let’s Turn the PDB into the Trump Daily Intelligence Briefing

January 24, 2025 by Fred Fleitz

Once a vital intelligence tool, the Presidential Daily Briefing has declined over two decades, plagued by politicization, bloated bureaucracy, and diminished credibility.

The Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB) was once a well-regarded daily intelligence summary prepared for the president and his most senior national security officials that provided timely and vital highly classified intelligence. Unfortunately, due to the bloated and increasingly politicized intelligence bureaucracy, the PDB’s usefulness and quality have plummeted over the last twenty years.

President Trump has well-founded suspicions about the U.S. Intelligence Community, which was weaponized against his campaigns and first administration. It therefore will take radical changes to fix the PDB and assure President Trump that his daily intelligence briefings are fair and objective.

I speak on this subject from experience. As a CIA analyst in the 1980s and 90s, I drafted over 50 PDB articles and received feedback from two presidents. At that time, the PDB contained 7-10 concise, carefully written articles on critical national security issues. Although the PDB usually did not shy away from controversial issues or bad news, articles would be added on issues of interest to the current president.

The PDB staff I worked with served for decades. Most PDB editors also served as briefers and were usually senior CIA analysts late in their careers who kept a low profile. They were on the PDB staff to serve, not for attention or to advance their careers. Although not every president liked or trusted the PDB, most did because these officers worked to produce a daily intelligence product that was not about politics or currying favor with the president or Congress.

Unfortunately, things changed for the worse for the PDB in the mid-1990s when the CIA decided to staff it with younger, up-and-coming officers and not just senior officers approaching retirement. Unfortunately, the CIA’s increasingly liberal analysis directorate exploited this change to put young liberal ideologues on the PDB staff, who used these assignments to rocket up the career ladder and advance the intelligence deep state.

It therefore is no accident that some of the most fervent anti-Trump intelligence officials were PDB briefers when they were young CIA officers. This includes former CIA Directors John Brennan and Michael Morrell, whose careers took off after they served on the PDB staff. Brennan was one of the most notorious anti-Trump CIA officials who helped organize the Russia collusion hoax against the Trump campaign in 2016. Morell helped organize the fraudulent October 2020 Hunter Biden laptop letter, which Brennan also signed.

After serving six years with the CIA, David Priess resigned after his tour on the PDB staff to write a book about the PDB and to do MSNBC interviews. Priess also signed the Hunter Biden laptop letter. In an October 2022 Fox News interview, Priess stubbornly defended signing this letter even though it had been thoroughly discredited by then.

The PDB got even worse when the newly created Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) took control of this publication in 2005. Under the ODNI’s management, the PDB became an intelligence community product to which all intelligence agencies could contribute, although the CIA still dominated it.

Under the ODNI’s management, the number of PDB recipients exploded, and it was no longer exclusively produced for the president. The PDB grew to 250 recipients during the Obama administration. The Trump administration reduced that number to about 105. It reportedly climbed to about 280 in the Biden administration.

Aside from further politicizing and dumbing down the PDB, these changes made it into a political football, with intelligence agencies and officers competing to place articles in this publication to advance their agendas with the White House and Congress.

For example, when I served on House Intelligence Committee staff from 2006-2011, intelligence agencies routinely cited the number of PDB items produced by their officers as metrics to justify their budget requests. Some of these agencies appeared to be drafting PDB articles to inflate their PDB numbers for Congress and not to produce crucial intelligence for the president.

Another problem caused by the ODNI’s control of the PDB has been its effort to ensure this publication is fair and equitable by mandating that every intelligence agency has opportunities to publish in it, even minor agencies that often produce substandard analysis.

Also due to the ODNI’s effort to make the PDB fair and equitable, less qualified officers from multiple intelligence agencies were assigned to the PDB staff. Some PDB jobs were filled based on the far-left “diversity, equity, and inclusion” ideology. This resulted in one poorly qualified CIA analyst becoming the PDB’s chief editor, who later posted pro-Palestinian images on her Facebook page and a selfie photo with the caption “Free Palestine” just after the horrific Hamas massacre against Israel on October 7, 2023.

PDB briefers have been openly hostile to President Trump. Before Trump received his first intelligence briefing in August 2016 as the GOP presidential nominee, several unnamed intelligence officers told reporters they would refuse to brief him, saying they did not trust Trump to protect classified information and cited discredited claims that the Trump campaign was colluding with Russia. After Trump received intelligence briefings before the 2016 election, several current and former intelligence officers leaked details to the press to discredit Trump and his advisers. Details of Trump’s PDB briefings as president also were leaked to the media to disparage him.

This is why President Trump refused to accept intelligence briefings before the 2024 election. He assumed his intelligence briefers would leak details of these briefings to the press to hurt his chances of winning the election.

During President Trump’s first term, his senior advisers attempted to address problems with the PDB and the politicization of the Intelligence Community with a restricted briefing session called the Oval Office Intelligence Briefing. This session would include the president, the vice president, the White House Chief of Staff, the National Security Advisor, the Deputy National Security Adviser, the CIA Director, the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), and one or two PDB briefers. During this session, a version of the PDB modified by the National Security Adviser and the Director of National Intelligence was presented along with other intelligence.

For two reasons, this was a Band-Aid fix to the PDB’s problems, not a serious solution.

First, if the Intelligence Community is so distrusted and incompetent that it cannot give its own daily intelligence briefing directly to the president, we are wasting almost $100 billion per year to keep it around.

Second, to be successful in national security, President Trump needs to hear intelligence unvarnished by policy considerations. He needs to hear intelligence that might challenge his policy assumptions, convey bad news, or suggest an administration policy may fail. The president needs to hear intelligence on critical national security issues that may differ from what his policy officials are telling him. The president needs to hear such intelligence from trusted and objective intelligence briefers every morning.

Although I understand the frustration of the first Trump administration with biased and politicized intelligence analysis, it is a bad idea for a policy official—the National Security Adviser—to modify or filter intelligence for the president as reportedly was done for the Oval Office Intelligence Briefing. Instead, we need strong leadership from the ODNI and CIA to ensure that the president is briefed by competent and objective intelligence analysts.

For now, the current state of the PDB is intolerable as President Trump starts his second term. However, this can easily be fixed.

First, the PDB should be transformed into a sleek and actionable daily intelligence summary prepared exclusively for President Trump—to be called the Trump Daily Intelligence Briefing.

Second, only a handful of very senior officials would have access to the Trump Daily Intelligence Briefing—the Vice President, the National Security Adviser, the White House Chief of Staff, the Secretary of State, and the Secretary of Defense.

Third, the Trump Daily Intelligence Briefing would be limited to seven to ten concise articles per day. These articles would present intelligence and analysis on current and fast-breaking national security issues that the president could not get elsewhere. The Trump Daily Intelligence Briefing would include articles of special interest to President Trump, such as ending the Gaza and Ukraine Wars, the U.S. acquisition of Greenland, Chinese influence over the Panama Canal, etc.

Fourth, the Trump Daily Intelligence Briefing would be a CIA publication. The experiment of putting the PDB under the control of the ODNI has been a disaster. (As I discussed in a January 17, 2025, American Greatness article, the wasteful and politicized ODNI should be scaled back or eliminated.) Although the CIA might consider contributions from other intelligence agencies to the Trump Daily Intelligence Briefing, this will be optional. Minor intelligence agencies would no longer be entitled to be included in this new publication.

Fifth, intelligence briefings of the president must allow for candid and confidential discussions between the president and his briefers. The president shouldn’t have to worry that discussions with his intelligence briefers might be leaked by them to the press to hurt him politically. Therefore, the new Trump Daily Intelligence Briefing must be produced and briefed by briefers carefully chosen by the CIA Director and approved by the White House Chief of Staff. In addition, to have the privilege of working on this presidential publication, these officers would be required to sign nondisclosure agreements and pledge not to write books or articles about Trump’s intelligence briefings or talk to the media about them before President Trump leaves office in January 2029. I recommend that others who regularly brief the president sign similar nondisclosure agreements.

A related point: the PDB should be briefed by the CIA’s PDB briefers. It is time to end the practice of the DNI or the CIA director acting as the president’s daily intelligence briefer. In the past, this has forced these officials to spend many hours preparing to give these briefings. It also made these briefings into an event these officials mainly used to increase their face time with the president. This makes no sense because the ODNI and CIA Director have large agencies and many intelligence projects to manage. Trump’s intelligence chiefs also should be spending most of their workdays reforming and depoliticizing their organizations. Therefore, normally only the CIA briefers of the Trump Daily Intelligence Briefing would brief the president, with only the White House Chief of Staff and National Security Advisor joining him. The CIA Director and DNI could occasionally attend to discuss intelligence on urgent national security issues.

President Trump needs the best possible intelligence support to end the serious global crises he inherited from President Biden. This should start by providing the president with a new daily intelligence publication—the Trump Daily Intelligence Briefing—specially designed for him and briefed by trusted and competent senior CIA officers. This will give President Trump the intelligence he needs to make our nation safe again.

***

Fred Fleitz is a former CIA analyst and staff member with the House Intelligence Committee. In 2018, he served as the National Security Council Chief of Staff and as a Deputy Special Assistant to President Trump.