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rational security, chatter, law fair no bull, and the aftermath.

What happens when an analyst is thinking, not, how can I best inform the president of the United States today on this tough national security challenge?

To bring the intelligence analysis to bear so that they can make a decision under less uncertainty.

Instead of thinking about that, what if the analyst is thinking, huh, how's this going to play in a few years when it's on Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN?

To the extent that an analyst's headspace is thinking about that, they're not serving the president as effectively.

So it's a legitimate argument, and it's one that has some concern.

I don't hear a lot of people now talking about that.

I still think there's enough of a service mentality focused on the customer, the president, that analysts are more focused on getting the analysis right.

But once in a while on a controversial topic, it's going to enter into an analyst's head.

These are going to be exposed in a few years, and I don't want to look like an idiot. How does that affect analysis?

I'm Quinta Jurassic, and this is the Law Fair podcast, November 5th, 2016.

It's two days until the election. We're all stressed and stir crazy, and we're not going to make you suffer through yet another podcast about what's going to happen on November 8th.

Instead, we're going to give you a break from endless campaign coverage by bringing you a conversation between Law Fair's Jack Goldsmith and David Prius,

a former intelligence officer and daily intelligence briefer at the CIA, and former desk officer at the State Department.

The two sat down at a Hoover Book Swarray for a discussion of Prius's new book, The President's Book of Secrets,

the untold story of intelligence briefings to America's Presidents from Kennedy to Obama.

While the book is framed as a study of the history of the President's Daily Brief for PDB, it's also a history of the American intelligence community since World War II,

...