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babylonsister

(171,059 posts) Sun Jul 28, 2019, 09:14 PM Jul 2019

Dan Coats Spoke Truth to Trump. Now He's Out.

Dan Coats Spoke Truth to Trump. Now He’s Out.
The director of national intelligence won plaudits for plainly laying out the intelligence community’s assessments on issues ranging from Iran to Russia, putting him at odds with the president.
Kathy Gilsinan
6:35 PM ET

Dan Coats attracted President Donald Trump’s ire on more than one occasion as the director of national intelligence, describing assessments on issues from Russia to North Korea that contradicted Trump’s own. On Sunday night, his time in office came to an end: Trump said, via Twitter, that Coats was stepping down, to be replaced by Republican Representative John Ratcliffe.

Coats lasted two years in office—longer than many of Trump’s other national-security Cabinet officials, and longer than any other director of national intelligence save one, establishing along the way a reputation of being willing to offer Trump conclusions he might not want to hear. Yet this wasn’t just a workplace spat between boss and employee. It fit Trump’s widely documented pattern of disinterest in information that contradicts his instincts, and his inclination to punish people who offer it. Coats isn’t the first victim of these attitudes, and he won’t be the last.

Ratcliffe, a vocal skeptic of the Mueller investigation into Russian election interference, won headlines for his aggressive questioning of former Special Counsel Robert Mueller during the latter’s testimony before Congress last week. Ratcliffe accused Mueller, in essence, of denying Trump due process, declaring that the president was not above the law “but he damn sure shouldn’t be below the law.” That display of partisanship directly precedes his nomination for a job that is supposed to be apolitical. Trump spoke glowingly of Ratcliffe in a tweet announcing his intent to nominate him for the post. “John will lead and inspire greatness for the Country he loves,” Trump wrote.

Coats was in a difficult position from the moment he took the job—leading a workforce that holds telling “truth to power” as an ideal while at the same time reporting to a boss whom an ally once accused of creating a “reality-distortion field” around himself. The DNI position itself, which was created after the 9/11 attacks to better coordinate intelligence sharing among different agencies, is one Trump reportedly considered eliminating altogether before appointing Coats. Some experts have called the DNI an ineffective additional layer of bureaucracy, and those in the job have struggled to navigate murky authorities and rival bureaucratic power centers like the head of the CIA.

Indeed, Coats, a lifelong politician and twice-retired senator from Indiana, wasn’t an obvious pick for a position historically held by intelligence professionals. But two former colleagues of his told me in February it was clear he respected the work of intelligence professionals and took seriously his responsibility to present it faithfully to the president. This was no small thing, given that the president had set a hostile tone with the intelligence community before he was even inaugurated, invoking Nazi Germany when excoriating intelligence leaks on Twitter.

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https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/07/dan-coats-out/594952/