Who Decides What the President Sees?

The most important document the president of the United States receives each day is called the President’s Daily Brief. It exists to tell the commander-in-chief what American intelligence has learned that he needs to know. According to memos newly disclosed by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, in 2020 an intelligence agency planned to edit Donald Trump’s copy so he would not see raw reporting on foreign efforts to interfere in the election he was about to contest.

The Gabbard memos pose a different question: not what the intelligence community knew, but what it hid from the president.

The Analysts Decided

The analytic ombudsman Barry Zulauf, in an early January 2021 report to the Senate Intelligence Committee, wrote that China analysts “appeared hesitant to assess Chinese actions as undue influence or interference” and “reluctant to have their analysis on China brought forward because they tend to disagree with the administration’s policies.” Their stated position, in his summary: they did not want their intelligence used to support those policies. Zulauf later revealed that analysts said they would not have their work used by “that vulgarian in the Oval Office.” In October 2020, two national intelligence officers wrote an alternative analysis memo making the contrary case. It met, in Zulauf’s words, with “considerable organizational counter pressure.”

The materials Gabbard has now referred to IC Inspector General Christopher Fox include whistleblower complaints from Christopher Porter, the former national intelligence officer for cyber. They describe warnings about Chinese access to state voter registration databases in as many as 18 states, suppressed concerns about Venezuela-linked election infrastructure, and emails depicting pressure on a CIA analyst to alter a federal record about an internal meeting in which officials reportedly hinted that China-related evidence was being held back to avoid helping Trump. Where raw reporting collided with staff preference, staff preference prevailed.

The 2019 Precedent

The same pattern produced the 2019 impeachment. In materials declassified last month, Gabbard’s office documented how then-IC IG Michael Atkinson, relying on a complainant with no firsthand knowledge of the Trump-Zelensky call and a key witness who had co-authored the 2017 Russia hoax assessment, exceeded his statutory jurisdiction and disregarded Department of Justice guidance to forward a “preliminary” complaint to Adam Schiff’s committee. The DOJ found “no campaign finance violation.” The IC IG transmitted the complaint anyway. The president was impeached on the basis of an inquiry that, by Atkinson’s own admission, had not determined whether the alleged conduct had taken place.

These are the consistent exercises of a power the agencies do not constitutionally hold. James Madison wrote in Federalist #10 that securing the public good against the danger of faction was the great object of popular government. The Constitution assumes that subordinate officers execute the policy of the elected branch faithfully. When permanent staff substitute their judgment for the voters’, on the grounds that the voters chose badly, they have not exposed a malfunction in the constitutional system: they have installed a different system alongside it.

The Gabbard referral to Inspector General Fox will produce, eventually, declassified evidence of who edited which document and why. The deeper question is the one the second Trump Administration was elected, in part, to settle: whether the unelected agencies will accept their constitutional subordination, or continue to claim the veto they have asserted, since at least 2019, over what the duly elected president of the United States is permitted to see.