THREAD:

Hi, it’s the President’s Daily Brief guy again.

NBC reports Joe Biden will hold daily/near daily PDB sessions—and Kamala Harris plans to keep attending when she’s in DC.

Why’s this interesting?

Read the report—then my thread below:

1/16 https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/biden-puts-daily-back-administration-s-intelligence-briefings-n1255554

“The president is receiving the PDB daily and intends to keep doing so,” a senior administration official says.

By taking briefings in person from intel officers each day (or close to it), Biden puts himself in a small group of presidents who have done so *that often*.

2/16

The President’s Daily Brief was created in 1964 for Lyndon Johnson.

He read the book avidly, often late at night while sitting in bed. Sometimes, as shown here, he did it in the morning.

But he took no in-person PDB briefings from intelligence community officers.

3/16

There’s no direct evidence that Richard Nixon read the PDB regularly while POTUS, although I suspect he did—if only to have a source on national security secrets apart from Henry Kissinger.

Regardless, he took no in-person PDB briefings from intelligence officers.

4/16

Gerald Ford in 1974 became the first president to not only read his daily book of secrets with interest, but also to take in-person, daily briefings about the PDB from intelligence community officers—though he kept that up only for his first year in office.

5/16

Carter and Reagan didn’t take such in-person PDB briefings from intel officers.

But George H. W. Bush did, thus becoming the first president in the President’s Daily Brief’s then-25 year history to welcome a CIA briefer every working morning that he was in Washington.

6/16

Bill Clinton took such briefings, too, but only irregularly.

It took George W. Bush’s presidency to see PDB briefings with intelligence officers every day again. And he amped it up, keeping his daily intel briefings anywhere—whether he was in DC or overnighting elsewhere.

7/16

Barack Obama settled into a pattern whereby he read the PDB (for him, over time, on a very special iPad) and talked about it with his senior advisors.

And then he invited intelligence community briefers in a few times a week to expand upon its content or walk on new items.

8/16

Trump, for 3+ years, had a PDB delivery pattern not unlike Obama: It was dropped off daily—whether he actually read it or not—and he took only a few in-person briefings from intel officers each week.

Even those briefings, however, stopped during his final months in office.

9/16

The NBC report also reports that Vice President Kamala Harris has been attending the president’s PDB sessions, “and that is the plan going forward,” one of her aides said.

How normal is it for the VP to get the President’s Daily Brief—and to attend the presidents session?

10/16

Vice presidents since Hubert Humphrey (LBJ’s VP) have generally had access to the President’s Daily Brief and read it on their own or taken briefings apart from the POTUS session.

A few, however, have *also* joined the president’s briefing, at least some of the time.

11/16

Dan Quayle, for example, often walked into Bush 41’s Oval Office PDB briefings, usually not long before they ended (because he’d already had his own session).

“The people who briefed me,” Quayle told me, “were very knowledgeable and very conversational. They were pros.”

12/16

Bill Clinton invited Al Gore to attend all of his NatSec briefings, including PDB ones—which Gore did when in town.

As Clinton’s in-person briefings became irregular, Gore’s own briefings stayed steady—so Clinton often asked Gore to follow up on issues raised by the book.

13/16

Vice President Dick Cheney, like the national security advisor and the White House chief of staff, regularly sat in on Bush 43’s daily PDB briefings. Cheney was a voracious consumer of intelligence throughout his eight years as VP.

14/16

Former CIA deputy director Michael Morell said tonight at a @mvhaydencenter event that Biden as VP read his copy of the PDB each morning and then would join President Obama for his in-person briefings.

I’ve yet to see evidence that Pence regularly joined Trump’s sessions.

15/16

The early intelligence briefing pattern for Biden and Harris is good—letting each of them get to know how the other one processes intelligence and uses it to inform policy thinking.

Absent a dramatic event pushing them in another direction, I suspect they will keep it up.

/end