President Trump shouldn’t have met alone with Russian President Vladimir Putin, his administration’s top intelligence official suggested Thursday.
“If he had asked me how that ought to be conducted, I would have suggested a different way,” Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats said during the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado. “But that’s not my role, that’s not my job, and so it is what it is.”
[DNI Dan Coats on Russian interference statement: ‘I was just doing my job’]
Trump has taken widespread criticism for the meeting, both in terms of his decision to meet with only translators present and his comments about the 2016 election interference, including the U.S.’ responsibility for the poor state of U.S.-Russia relations. Coats acknowledged that he doesn’t “know what happened in that meeting,” but emphasized that Trump will reveal the details as necessary.
“That is the president’s prerogative,” he said.
It’s not the first time that Coats has been on the outside-looking-in at a meeting between the president and senior Russian officials. The former Indiana senator, who accepted Trump’s offer to lead the intelligence community as he was retiring, revealed that he “did not” know that Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak were meeting Trump in the Oval Office in May.
“I was not aware of that,” he said. “I’m not aware of anything like that since. You have to understand, the president did not come through the system, he came from the outside. I don’t think there was any nefarious attempt to do anything, but, that’s history.”
The encounter, which took place one day after Trump fired then-FBI Director James Comey, proved doubly controversial. Trump reportedly predicted to Lavrov that Comey’s ouster would alleviate the “great pressure” his team had faced due to the Russia storyline. Trump also passed along information provided by an American ally about a plot by the Islamic State in Syria, stoking concerns that he might have inadvertently exposed a foreign intelligence source.
Coats said that allies shouldn’t worry about sharing intelligence with the U.S., adding that counterterrorism operations can be a point of cooperation even with adversarial regimes such as Russia.
“We all have the same basic responsibility of keeping our people safe, to the extent we can work together on this, and this alone ought to bind us together,” he told NBC’s Andrea Mitchell during the Aspen panel. “But there’s a very sharp line that, when you step over with someone that you’re not sure about … you don’t go past the [counter-terrorism information].”
