CIA on the President’s Daily Brief
March 10th, 2006 by Steven Aftergood(Updated Below)
Some new details on the preparation of the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) and its presentation to the President and a small number of other officials are discussed in a Central Intelligence Agency declaration (pdf) filed last week in the prosecution of former Vice Presidential aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby.
“Six mornings a week, intelligence briefers meet with the President and selected senior Executive officials to provide a daily intelligence briefing. Each briefer meets with one or more designated officials to present an oral briefing and a binder containing written materials for each official’s review,” wrote CIA official Marilyn A. Dorn.
She argued in her March 2 declaration that responding to Mr. Libby’s request for production of various PDBs and related material would be extremely burdensome and might also infringe on executive privilege.
A March 7 response from Mr. Libby is available here.
The CIA has agreed to process a Freedom of Information Act request from the Federation of American Scientists for redacted PDB materials that it had declassified and provided to the Office of Special Counsel.
But the Agency denied a request for fee waiver because, CIA official Scott Koch wrote on March 3, “disclosing the information you seek is not likely to contribute significantly to public understanding of the operations and activities of the United States Government.”
Update: The Court today partially granted and partially denied the Libby request for discovery of PDB-related material and other items. The government was ordered to provide the defense with “redacted versions of the documents provided to the defendant during his morning intelligence briefing that were also viewed by the Vice President” or “topic overviews of the subject matter contained in those documents.”
See the Court’s March 10 Order here (pdf), and the underlying Memorandum Opinion here (pdf).
March 10th, 2006 at 1:10 pm
Does the CIA agreeing to process this request mean that the Agency has agreed to consider the request, or that it has agreed to release the material from the PDBs?
[Strictly speaking, it only means the former, that they will consider the request. But only unclassified, redacted records were requested, so it is reasonable to expect that these may in fact be released. --SA]
March 10th, 2006 at 1:47 pm
Thanks for the quick response. Here’s a followup: How long would you expect it to take for the request to be processed and the records to be released?
[That's hard to say. But I would guesstimate three to six months. I will post the CIA response, whatever it is, when I receive it. --SA]