Rare August hearings are scheduled, memos distributed and high-level briefings conducted as institutions look inward to see what changes they can make.
Both linked high-level briefings that Congressional leaders received on the 2008 financial crisis and on health care to their purchase and sale of certain stocks.
The F.B.I. paid her $1.7 million over the next two decades to provide sensitive intelligence on Chinese affairs that was considered so valuable it was used to provide numerous high-level briefings to the White House over the years.
Hoping to influence the new administration on North Korea, South Korea secretly dispatched its intelligence chief to Washington recently, following the foreign minister by only two days as part of a series of high-level briefings.
But from all I have been able to ascertain from high-level briefings, the logical conclusion based on all of the evidence, all of the broken promises, all the obfuscation and now this nexus between Hussein and other terrorist groups and individuals is that we simply can't afford the risk to humanity.
Robert H. Scales Jr., a retired Army general and analyst for Fox News and National Public Radio whose consulting company advises several military firms on weapons and tactics used in Iraq, wanted the Pentagon to approve high-level briefings for him inside Iraq in 2006.
(Although Spicer did not make any promises about the briefing room, he "expressed concern that journalists adhere to a high level of decorum at press briefings and press conferences," according to a readout of the meeting from Mason, which is akin to a spokesman for Miley Cyrus requesting that concert attendees dress modestly and not engage in any provocative dancing).
Just last month in Washington, members of the federally appointed bipartisan Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism made it clear that for sheer scariness, nothing could compete with what they had heard in a series of high-level intelligence briefings about the dangers of Pakistan's nuclear technology going awry.
Speaking after a day of high-level intelligence briefings with British officials in London, Abbott described the unfolding atrocity in northern Iraq as a "humanitarian catastrophe" and said Australia would provide humanitarian aid to Yazidi refugees besieged by Islamic State (Isis) forces on Mount Sinjar in northern Iraq.
My trip's 10-day agenda was remarkably similar to Pompeo's, with fewer high-level security briefings and more sing-alongs.
She had held media briefings earlier that day and considered herself to "have a high level of what was occurring" but "completely rejected" that she might later have made any suggestion about the negotiation strategy during the call to Jenkins.
