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

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