Trump administration has tightly restricted access to president’s daily intelligence brief

By Katie Bo Lillis, Kylie Atwood and Zachary Cohen, CNN

(CNN) — The Trump administration has tightly restricted the number of people who have access to President Donald Trump’s highly classified daily intelligence report, five sources familiar with the move told CNN.

Administration officials planned from the earliest days of Trump’s second term to cut access to the so-called President’s Daily Brief, or PDB — in part because during his first term, details from the report were sometimes leaked to the press, which contributed to the president’s sense that the intelligence community was trying to undermine him.

Initially, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles was personally approving who had access, one of the sources said. Now Tulsi Gabbard, who was sworn in as Trump’s director of national intelligence in February, oversees the document and has taken responsibility for who has access.

It’s not unusual for new administrations to rejigger who has access to the PDB. And career intelligence officials responsible for putting it together typically approach a new administration to ask who should receive it and officials often move at first to limit access.

But Trump, since he was first elected in 2016, has harbored a deep mistrust of the intelligence community, and in his second administration he has appointed officials who openly share his suspicions. Current and former officials say the move to limit access to the PDB comes against the backdrop of the president and his top officials’ determination to quash leaks and bring to heel what they see as subversive elements within the intelligence community — highlighting what one US official described as “ongoing large distrust issues.”

That distrust — which reached its full expression in Trump’s sense that the FBI’s investigation into his 2016 campaign’s ties to Russia was a politically-motivated “witch hunt” and a “hoax” — continues to reverberate in the administration’s muscular approach to managing the intelligence community.

Gabbard in particular has vowed publicly to “aggressively [pursue] recent leakers” and “clean house.”

Former officials say shrinking access to the PDB is an equivocal move that might serve as a confidence-builder between the president and the community — but could also intensify divisions within the government and lead to a disorganized foreign policy, former officials familiar with the process said.

“There’s a risk if you limit it too much you’re not operating off the same page and you have disagreement in the administration on key issues,” one former intelligence official said. Hypothetically, “you don’t have (Secretary of State Marco) Rubio doing the same thing (special envoy to the Middle East Steve) Witkoff is doing.”

CNN has asked the White House for comment.

‘Way too many’ were getting the PDB

The PDB, which has existed in some form or another since the Kennedy administration, has been presented in different formats under different presidents, but it is widely regarded as one of the most important documents the US government produces, containing some of the most sensitive and up-to-date analysis it has.

The general trend across several decades has been to widen dissemination, but there has been an ebb and flow from president to president. Richard Nixon, for example, had a very, very small dissemination list, at one point restricting his own defense secretary from accessing it, according to one former intelligence official.

Some former officials insist that “way too many people” were getting the PDB under Presidents Biden and Obama, with one saying, “There are slimmed-down versions that are appropriate for most, but very few need what POTUS gets.”

At least one proposal for overhauling the PDB that was circulated among senior Trump officials during the president’s first days in office called for restricting access to the PDB to only a handful of very senior officials and limiting it to roughly 10 articles per day, one of the sources said.

One of the sources said some agencies have been able to renegotiate access.

There’s a cachet to receiving it, several former officials said — no one likes to be left out, even if they don’t have a strict “need to know” reason to receive the document.

“Everybody wants to be a cool kid and get all the good stuff, to get what the president gets just so they can be part of the club,” the former official said.

Just because senior officials don’t receive the PDB doesn’t mean they don’t receive the intelligence it contains in some form or another.

But if access to the PDB becomes too restricted, this person and another former intelligence official said, the White House risks a messy scenario in which senior officials are getting slightly different analytical interpretations of US intelligence.

They won’t be working from the operating picture and might respond inconsistently to foreign policy developments.

That could put the United States at a disadvantage in sensitive negotiations, for example — a path Trump is currently pursuing with multiple US adversaries.

Already, different Trump administration officials responsible for US foreign policy seem to be offering subtly different views of the administration’s approach in public, in particular on tariffs, where Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett have articulated the strategy differently than White House trade adviser Peter Navarro.

Access to the PDB is should be weighed: Shrinking it can give the president confidence that the intelligence analysis will be kept private and, ideally, allow him to consider the honest views of analysts without worrying about the politics of whatever the issue is.

But it can also keep key people responsible for carrying out his policies in the dark about the United States’ best assessments of its adversaries and the risks they pose to the country.

“I don’t think in the theoretical it’s bad, because it will give more freedom to the intelligence community because there will be less pressure to hold things back — they’re going to be more able to tell POTUS if he’s not worried Tom, Dick and Harry are reading it and it might leak,” the former official said.

But the PDB “level-sets for the entire national security team, so it’s really important that everybody has a basic sense of what’s going on,” that person said.

Longstanding distrust

The distrust between Trump and the sprawling intelligence community he now commands has simmered unabated since he was president-elect in 2017, and top Obama administration officials first briefed him on the intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia had sought to intervene in the 2016 election on his behalf.

The lesson Trump appeared to take away from his first administration — in which leaks, including of classified information, were rampant — was that the intelligence community was trying to weaponize its data and its analysis to undermine his administration.

Trump’s senior advisers attempted to similarly address issues with the PDB during his first term with a restricted briefing session called the Oval Office Intelligence briefing, that person said.

Before the 2024 election, Trump refused to accept intelligence briefings traditionally offered to the major party candidates — in part because of leaks of PDB material during his first administration, one of the sources said.

In his second term, he has moved aggressively to limit access to information about intelligence and policy deliberations to a small group of officials that the White House has deemed sufficiently loyal to the MAGA cause.

That dynamic is particularly acute at the CIA, according to current and former US officials. There, the White House recently intervened to oust a longtime career official who had been slated to lead the agency’s operational branch, according to current and former officials — an unusual move, because that post is usually determined by the agency itself.

“Things are very tightly held with innermost circle,” the US official said.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2025 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.