During Trump’s briefing, a veteran intelligence official typically describes intelligence highlights contained in a shortened, written version of the PDB. Trump has rarely, if ever, requested that the document be left behind for him to read, according to people familiar with the meetings.
Pompeo has said the president is briefed on current developments, as well as upcoming events – such as visits by foreign leaders – and longer-term strategic issues.
“The president asks hard questions,” he said in public remarks last month. “He’s deeply engaged. We’ll have a rambunctious back-and-forth, all aimed at making sure we’re delivering him the truth as best we understand it.”
Trump’s admirers say he has a unique ability to cut through conventional foreign policy wisdom and ask questions that others have long taken for granted. “Why are we even in Somalia?” or “Why can’t I just pull out of Afghanistan?” he will ask, according to officials.
The president asks “edge” questions, said one senior administration official, meaning that he pushes his staff to question long-held assumptions about U.S. interests in the world.
Another person familiar with the briefing process said that, at times, Trump has been dismissive of his briefers. He has shaken his head, frowned and complained that the briefers were “talking down to him,” this person said.
Trump has at times demonstrated a deep distrust of the intelligence community. He has accused Obama-era intelligence chiefs of rooting against his election and exaggerating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election in an effort to delegitimize his presidency.
The Washington Post reported last year that intelligence officials in some cases have included Russia-related intelligence only in the president’s daily written assessment, steering clear of it in the oral briefing in order not to upset Trump.
The last U.S. president who is believed not to have regularly reviewed the PDB was Richard Nixon. The historical record contains no references to him having read the document, although Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, received a copy each day, according to David Priess, a former CIA briefer and author of “The President’s Book of Secrets.”
“It is not unprecedented for someone to get only an oral briefing of the PDB,” Priess said. “But it is the exception rather than the rule. And a rare exception.”
The intelligence community prides itself on tailoring the briefing document and the oral briefing to each president’s style. Obama preferred to receive the PDB on a secure iPad to review before asking questions of his briefers.
President George W. Bush typically read the PDB first thing in the morning, with his briefer present to review the highlights and answer questions, according to former officials who briefed him.
Neither Obama nor Bush reviewed the briefing book every day, and at times they skipped a session, especially when traveling
President Ronald Reagan read the PDB every day but chose not to have a briefing from a CIA officer, said John Poindexter, who served as Reagan’s national security adviser. Reagan often discussed the briefing document in morning Oval Office meetings with his top advisers, Poindexter said.
Trump indicated early on that he had little interest in immersing himself in detailed intelligence documents.
“I like bullets or I like as little as possible. I don’t need, you know, 200-page reports on something that can be handled on a page,” he told Axios shortly before taking office.
During the transition, the CIA offered to give Trump the same daily intelligence briefing that Obama received, a tradition for presidents-elect. But Trump declined a daily update, opting for less frequent briefings.
“You know, I’m, like, a smart person,” Trump said in a “Fox News Sunday” interview in December 2016. “I don’t have to be told the same thing and the same words every single day for the next eight years. It could be eight years – but eight years. I don’t need that.”
At the time, Obama warned it was never wise to skip insights from intelligence professionals.
“If you’re not getting their perspective – their detailed perspective – then you are flying blind,” he said in an interview on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show.”
During the first year of Trump’s presidency, the format of his intelligence briefings changed.
In the early days, he received the traditional briefing sometime between 9 and 10:30 a.m., according to his publicly released schedules. Within a few months, his intelligence advisers began augmenting the sessions with maps, charts, pictures and videos, as well as “killer graphics,” as Pompeo put it at the time.
“That’s our task, right? To deliver the material in a way that he can best understand the information we’re trying to communicate,” Pompeo told The Post in May.
The early briefing sessions had a more freewheeling quality, according to current and former administration officials. Five or more White House aides might join Trump for the briefing, in addition to his briefer and intelligence officials.
The meetings were often dominated by whatever topic most interested the president that day. Trump would discuss the news of the day or a tweet he sent about North Korea or the border wall – or anything else on his mind, two people familiar with the briefings said.
On such days, there would only be a few minutes left – and the briefers would have barely broached the topics they came to discuss, one senior U.S. official said.
“He often goes off on tangents during the briefing and you’d have to rein him back in,” one official said.
After he joined the administration in July, Chief of Staff John F. Kelly slashed the number of people who could attend the intelligence briefings in an effort to exert more discipline over how the president consumes information, current and former officials said.
The Washington Post’s Josh Dawsey and Julie Tate contributed to this report.
