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WILMINGTON, Del. (AP) – Joe Biden got his first look as president-elect at the President’s Daily Brief, a top-secret summary of U.S. intelligence and world events – a document former First Lady Michelle Obama called “The Death, the destruction, and deliver horrible things.
Biden has already had his eyes on different iterations of the so-called PDB, which is tailored to how each president likes to absorb information.
Over ten years ago, Biden read President George W. Bush’s PDB during Biden’s transition to vice-presidency. After that, he read President Barack Obama’s PDB for eight years. Starting Monday, after a four-year hiatus, he reads President Donald Trump’s PDB.
“Briefers will almost certainly ask Biden what he prefers in terms of format and style,” said David Priess, author of “The President’s Book of Secrets,” an APB story. “At a minimum, they see what seems to resonate most with him, so that when they make the book their book, they can adapt it to him.
Obama’s PDB was a 10- to 15-page document hidden in a leather filing cabinet, which he found waiting on the breakfast table. Later in his presidency, he enjoyed reading the top-secret intelligence file on a secure iPad.
“Michelle called it” The Book of Death, Destruction, and Horrible Things, “Obama wrote in his recently published book,” A Promised Land. ”
“Someday I might read about the terrorist cells in Somalia or the unrest in Iraq or whether the Chinese or the Russians were developing new weapon systems,” Obama wrote. “Almost always there were references to potential terrorist plots, however vague, poorly documented, or ineffective – a form of due diligence on the part of the intelligence community, intended to avoid the kind of questioning that had occurred. after 9/11 ”
From now on, until inauguration day, Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris will read the PDB designed for Trump, which had been slow to give him access to Biden and Harris as he disputes the outcome of the election.
Trump, who prefers to absorb information visually, likes short texts and graphics.
“Trump himself said during his campaign and during the transition in 2016 that he didn’t like reading long documents – that he preferred bullets,” said Priess, who hasn’t seen any of Trump’s PDBs. . “It probably contains charts, tables, charts – things like that. Not the parody that people make, it’s like a comic book … but something more visual. But we don’t know for sure.
The written brief, which Trump doesn’t always read, is often followed by a verbal briefing with an intelligence official, though those oral briefings stopped at least for a while in October. Priess said he was not sure why they had stopped or whether they had resumed, but that they had stopped at a time when Trump was spending much of his time on the election track.
Before Trump allowed Biden to get the PDB as president-elect, Biden received general intelligence information as a candidate. But they were more general and did not include the main secrets of the nation.
The other thing an elected president receives is a briefing “on covert CIA actions,” former acting CIA director Mike Morell said at an event hosted by the Washington-based Center for Presidential Transition . “It is important that the elected president receives this briefing … because on the day of the inauguration, these secret actions will become those of the new president.
In 1961, President John F. Kennedy read his first memoir while sitting on a diving board by a swimming pool in his retreat in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. President Lyndon Johnson enjoyed reading his brief in the afternoon. President Richard Nixon relied on his national security adviser Henry Kissinger to scan the briefs and tell him what he thought the president should know.
As the laborious ballot recount dragged on in 2000, President Bill Clinton decided that the government of the day should. George W. Bush should have access to his PDB in case he is the winner. Bush became the first incoming president to read it before being president-elect.
Biden receives the PDB later than usual due to Trump’s continued protest against the election results. Trump approved briefings for Biden last Tuesday, a day after his administration approved the formal transition process to his successor.
When Biden steps into the Oval Office, he will inherit nuclear threats from North Korea and Iran, changing political dynamics in the Middle East, the end of the US presence in Afghanistan, and growing competition from China.
Biden had access to the PDB in Wilmington, Delaware. Harris received him in a secure room in the Commerce Department, where the Presidential Transition Offices are located.
Even Biden, who has decades of foreign policy experience, could fall victim to an old political adage that no matter how badly he thinks it, he could learn the opposite of the PDB.
Former CIA Director Michael Hayden wrote in his book that the revelations and new ideas found in the PDB are known as “aw s —” moments. As in, “Aw s —“, he wrote, “I wish I hadn’t said it during this campaign in Buffalo.”
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Riechmann reported from Washington.
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