Biden to receive first intelligence briefing Monday
President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect
Kamala Harris will begin receiving the nation’s most sensitive secrets Monday
as they prepare to assume office on Jan 20.
The pair are to receive the highly classified
Presidential Daily Brief, a summary of the most important information collected
across the U.S. intelligence community that is prepared and delivered by the
Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Outgoing President Donald
Trump approved the briefings for Biden last Tuesday, a day after his
administration approved the formal transition process to his successor.
It was not immediately clear how Biden and Harris
would receive the briefing, which is tailored to the needs and interests of its
top recipient. For Trump, that has meant a focus on visuals and a preference
for paper. His predecessor, Barack Obama, came to embrace the briefing being
presented on a modified secure tablet. Given its sensitivity, the leather-bound
briefing is usually delivered in person by a career member of the intelligence
community, though Trump has increasingly let that process lapse.
On a given day, I might read about terrorist cells
in Somalia or unrest in Iraq or the fact that the Chinese or Russians were
developing new weapons systems,” Obama wrote in his memoir. “Nearly always,
there was mention of potential terrorist plots, no matter how vague, thinly
sourced, or unactionable—a form of due diligence on the part of the
intelligence community, meant to avoid the kind of second-guessing that had
transpired after 9/11.”
He added that his wife, Michelle, called it “The
Death, Destruction, and Horrible Things Book.”
Much of the information in the PDB requires no
immediate response, Obama wrote, “The goal was to have a continuously
up-to-date sense of all that was roiling in the world, the large, small, and
sometimes barely perceptible shifts that threatened to upset whatever
equilibrium we were trying to maintain.”
The PDB, as it is known, is just one component of
the intelligence briefings presented to an incoming administration. Biden and
Harris will also be able to receive in-depth subject matter briefings from
intelligence experts, as well as a run-down of extremely classified covert
operations underway during the Trump administration, the latter necessary to
determine if they want to maintain or modify those operations once they assume
office.
