Clinton and Trump will begin receiving top secret briefings from the US intelligence community.
Presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump will begin receiving top secret briefings from the US intelligence community in the coming days, and that's leading some big names in Washington — and around the country — to say they shouldn't go forward because neither candidate can be trusted with sensitive classified information.
But the president says they'll continue as planned, and his intel chief — and former senior spies — say that's good thing. Moreover, they say it's simply not that big of a deal.
"Candidates only get parts of briefings," said former CIA officer David Priess, who wrote The President's Book of Secrets, and briefed the attorney general, national security advisor, and the FBI director during George W. Bush's administration.
"They receive a no-kidding, top-secret, classified briefing, based on intelligence sources that are highly classified," he said. But there's one important omission: the brief doesn't include information about "covert actions, intelligence sources, and methods."
In other words: Trump and Clinton will get nothing like the President's Daily Brief, the "crown jewel of US intelligence," as Priess calls it. To read that coveted document, they will have to wait until after the election — because the president-elect gets the PDB, too. (You too can read the Presidential Daily Briefs — from the 1960s. The CIA declassified them last year, and they can be found here.)
According to John McLaughlin, who served as deputy director and acting director of the CIA from 2000 to 2004 and has briefed candidates and sitting presidents, both Clinton and Trump should receive briefings — despite the FBI director's admonishing of Clinton over her handling of classified emails and the "sloppiness" of Trump's comments. The intelligence community, he said, should be non-partisan.
"Trump has said some things that I strongly disagree with, but that's not a reason for denying a briefing," McLaughlin said. "In fact it may be a reason to give him a briefing, in order to give him a better understanding of these issues that are dramatically more complex than he seems to understand."
