Former Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats had fears that Russian President Vladimir Putin had dirt on President Trump, according to veteran journalist Bob Woodward’s new book.
Woodward wrote in his upcoming book, Rage, which is scheduled to be released on Sept. 15, that Coats held “deep suspicions” that Putin “had something” on Trump, CNN reported Wednesday. Coats viewed “no other explanation” for the president’s behavior, according to Woodward.
Woodward wrote that Coats “continued to harbor the secret belief, one that had grown rather than lessened, although unsupported by intelligence proof, that Putin had something on Trump.” Woodward added, “How else to explain the president’s behavior? Coats could see no other explanation.”
He and top staff members “examined the intelligence as carefully as possible,” and Coats still had reservations about the relationship between Trump and Putin, Woodward wrote. “Coats saw how extraordinary it was for the president’s top intelligence official to harbor such deep suspicions about the president’s relationship with Putin. But he could not shake them.”
New York Times reporter Michael Schmidt’s new book, Donald Trump v. The United States: Inside the Struggle to Stop a President, reported that the Justice Department secretly blocked special counsel Robert Mueller’s team from conducting a Trump-Russia counterintelligence investigation without informing the FBI. Former FBI agent Peter Strzok and Mueller’s “pitbull” Andrew Weissmann have cast doubt on the report.
Woodward, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner best known for his investigative reporting on the Watergate scandal leading to President Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974, interviewed the president more than a dozen times for the book. Trump has dismissed the book as a “fake.”
