Chuck4Democracy 🦋: David Priess: THREAD: Speculation has started in earnest about what will happen this year to the tradition of classified intelligence briefings for the major party presidential candidates. And a lot of what’s being said is wrong, or at least incomplete. Here’s ground truth —> 1/12

David Priess: THREAD: Speculation has started in earnest about what will happen this year to the tradition of classified intelligence briefings for the major party presidential candidates. And a lot of what’s being said is wrong, or at least incomplete. Here’s ground truth —> 1/12

Major-party POTUS candidates have been offered intel briefings during the campaign since 1952. (Not to be confused with the heavy intel support presidents-elect get—including, since the President’s Daily Brief began in the mid 1960s, a copy of the outgoing POTUS’s PDB.) 2/12

The tradition began in 1952, when President Truman—reflecting on his sudden succession to the presidency in April 1945—offered classified briefings to both candidates (Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson) seeking to succeed him. No statute required it. Just a courtesy. 3/12

Every four years since then, the two major party nominees—and, most of the time, also their VP nominees—have been offered all-source assessments of global hotspots, almost always after the parties’ conventions. They need not be classified, or offered at all. But they are. 4/12

Originally, the CIA provided the briefings. Since intelligence community reforms in 2004, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has managed the process. And it has worked; the vast majority of candidates have gladly taken one or more pre-election briefings. 5/12

These sit-down sessions with intelligence professionals stop well short of the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) and other top-tier finished intel products. But even without the PDB, these limited sessions for candidates serve multiple purposes. 6/12

First, per Truman’s vision, they give the nominees a robust overview of the national security landscape. Candidates with deep foreign policy experience naturally get less out of these than candidates with scant previous exposure to international affairs. 7/12

and now as a felon...

Final disposition of PDBs: The declassified bits are compiled into Electronic Briefing Books (EBB) & housed in the National Security Archives at George Washington University. They're freely available to the public. Real history. nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/

Electronic Briefing Books: compilations of declassified documentsnsarchive2.gwu.edu National Security Archive's concise selections of key declassified records on U.S. national security, foreign, diplomatic, military, and intelligence policy

Here's a good example: The Kissinger State Department Telcons TELCONS SHOW KISSINGER OPPOSED HUMAN RIGHTS DIPLOMACY; SECRETARY OF STATE TAPPED OWN PHONE CALLS nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEB...

The Kissinger State Department Telconsnsarchive2.gwu.edu

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