Posted originally on the CTH on November 14, 2024 | Sundance 

Almost every day an intelligence community overview assessment is compiled, it’s called the Presidential Daily Briefing or PDB.

The PDB contains content primarily produced by the CIA.  However, in the modern era, the PDB is assembled and enhanced by adding information from other intelligence agencies (silos).  The Director of National Intelligence assembles it; the position Tulsi Gabbard has recently been nominated for.

The DNI (now Tulsi) compiles the information, then delivers the PDB to the President, the National Security Advisor (now Mike Waltz) and the list of people assigned by the President to review it.

The PDB is the Intelligence Community (IC) telling the Office of the President, this is what’s going on.  The PDB frames the worldview of the CIA and other agencies.

However, if the CIA/IC wants to frame policy and action to their agenda – and not to the agenda of the president/administration per se’ – the CIA/IC can shape the PDB information toward their own individual objectives. In the past several decades the CIA manipulation of the PDB became obvious.

Because the PDB was no longer considered to be an “independent” finding of fact, and was/is, instead, more of a CIA tool to shape and control the president, it became increasingly useless.

President Obama saw the traps within the CIA/IC use of the PDB and started to ignore it. Obama gave the PDB to almost two-dozen administration officials daily, essentially saying, “here this is what the CIA say is going on – check it out.” Meanwhile Obama did what he wanted to do in shaping policy, often regardless of the PDB content.

With an incoming President Trump administration, the CIA/IC use of the PDB to manipulate outcomes will be even more on display. With that in mind, here’s one approach that might be worth considering.

Make the CIA/IC (now Ratcliffe/Tulsi) provide a footnote for every assertion of fact within the PDB.

Put the footnotes into a classified appendix that includes sources and methods and give the appendix only to the National Security Advisor, now Mike Waltz.  [ie. ‘Review and return’]

Let NSA Mike Waltz then review the attributions of source material in the White House SCIF. Then, if any concerns are noted, Waltz can turn to the National Security Council with a generalized statement describing the concern saying, “check this out.”

The NSC can then dig into the granular details and return with their own independent assessment about the validity of the information.

The National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz, can then go question the specific CIA/IC silo about any contradiction that might be at issue.

Do this enough times, and I predict the PDB will quickly change in both tone and content. The originators of the intelligence assessment, the CIA and other agencies, will be on notice that their homework is being checked by the National Security Council.

Just a thought.