Story highlights John Mueller says the daily briefs are filled with threats and have a track record of terrifying the presidents who receive them

He notes that Garrett Graff says report is "filled to the brim with whispers, rumors, and vacuous, unconfirmed information"

John Mueller is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and a political scientist at Ohio State University. His most recent book, co-authored by Mark Stewart, is "Chasing Ghosts: The Policing of Terrorism. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his.

(CNN) As he does with considerable regularity, Donald Trump has elevated the eyebrows of the foreign policy establishment with his practice of undergoing intelligence briefings only once a week on average, instead of daily. Now his team says that he is getting the President's Daily Brief three times a week, along with daily briefings from his appointee for national security adviser.

Although Trump's reduced schedule of briefings is commonly interpreted as an effort to diss the intelligence community, it seems that Trump's chief goal is to keep himself from becoming bored. As he put it on Fox News Sunday a few days ago, "I'm, like, a smart person. I don't have to be told the same thing and the same words every single day for the next eight years....I don't need that."

But the problem with intelligence briefings is not so much that they cause boredom in the recipient as that they routinely induce terror.

Central to the briefing is the "threat matrix," a compendium assembled by the CIA and the FBI that includes all the "threats" -- or more accurately "leads" -- needing to be followed up. Garrett Graff reports that it is "filled to the brim with whispers, rumors, and vacuous, unconfirmed information" and that it can come off as "a catalogue of horrors" and as the "daily looming prognoses of Armageddon." Philip Mudd notes the "voluminous and dominating" threat information, much of which he points out is raw and "below threshold" for top leaders, and notes that it contributes "to a pervasive sense that every day might bring a new attack."

As Henry Kissinger stresses , "Historians rarely do justice to the psychological stress on a policy-maker." One can only imagine what happens when this rather natural hazard of office is exacerbated every day by fusillades of seemingly dire threat information generated by people who are paid to identify and inflate threats, not to downplay them. "My job," recalls one Pentagon official, "was to look for all the bad stuff. Scanning for threats is what we get paid to do."

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