Trump says Coats leaving post as intelligence director
WASHINGTON — Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats will leave his position next month, President Donald Trump announced Sunday, capping a tumultuous relationship in which the two were often at odds over the wisdom of negotiating with Russia, the status of Iran’s nuclear weapons program and the severity of foreign threats to U.S. elections.
Trump said in a tweet that he would nominate Rep. John Ratcliffe, R-Texas, a third-term congressman and prominent Trump supporter, to replace Coats. Ratcliffe launched a spirited defense of Trump last Wednesday, grilling former special counsel Robert Mueller about why he had investigated the president for possible obstruction of justice in his probe of Russian election interference.
In an appearance Sunday on Fox News, Ratcliffe characterized Mueller’s report as an untrustworthy document written by aides and lawyers for Hillary Clinton.
Trump called Ratcliffe a “highly respected Congressman” who “will lead and inspire greatness for the Country he loves.” He thanked Coats “for his great service to our Country.”
For months, Coats has understood that his relationship with Trump, which was never strong, had soured to the point that his departure was inevitable, according to a former senior intelligence official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Coats had felt isolated and left out of important national security decision-making, the former official said.
Coats had publicly taken positions that put him at odds with Trump and didn’t hide that he was out of the loop.
In July 2018, while speaking at a national security conference in Aspen, Colorado, the intelligence chief infuriated White House officials when he said that if the president had asked for his advice, he would have told him not to meet privately with Russian President Vladimir Putin at their summit in Helsinki. The two leaders met with no American officials or Trump aides present.
Coats also didn’t hide his dismay when he learned, in the middle of an interview at the conference, that the White House had extended an invitation for Putin to visit Washington.
“That’s going to be special,” Coats said to the audience of a few hundred, who responded with laughter.
Axios first reported Sunday that Coats’s departure was imminent and that Ratcliffe was likely to replace him.
From the moment Trump nominated Coats in January 2017, he struck many current and former officials as more of a caretaker in the position, a former senator from Indiana and ambassador to Germany who had been coaxed out of retirement to take one of the more challenging jobs in U.S. national security.
Coats regularly attends the president’s daily intelligence briefing session, along with CIA Director Gina Haspel and a senior U.S. intelligence official. But the day-to-day running of the intelligence community has fallen to Coats’s deputy, Sue Gordon, a career intelligence officer who is widely admired among the workforce and has bipartisan support on Capitol Hill.
While Coats’s successor awaits confirmation, Gordon would probably assume the duties of intelligence director on an acting basis.
It is unclear whether Ratcliffe would be confirmed in the Senate. He has no background in intelligence, though he served as a U.S. attorney and held a counterterrorism position in the Justice Department.
Previous intelligence directors have also not been career intelligence officers. But they have also not been such vocal political supporters of a president. Trump has repeatedly criticized the intelligence agencies as having tried to undermine his campaign and has accused, without evidence, former senior intelligence officials from the Obama administration of illegally spying on him.
Trump has given Attorney General William Barr unusual authority to investigate the intelligence agencies’ role in the probe of Russian election interference.