Retiring Indiana senator Dan Coats is under consideration to be President-elect Donald Trump’s choice for Director of National Intelligence, according to a report and confirmed to THE WEEKLY STANDARD by a source with knowledge of the situation.
Politico wrote Wednesday evening that Coats, who serves on the Senate Intelligence Committee and was a finalist to be President George W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense, was being examined for the position, citing a senior Trump transition aide. A second source confirmed the news to TWS Thursday morning, a day after the outgoing lawmaker met with the president-elect in New York City.
“I didn’t come here to be asked to be considered for anything,” Coats said after the meeting, according to a pool report. “I was invited here to just sit down and discuss a number of issues that the president would be facing, and I gave him some of my years of experience in terms of what I thought they would be dealing with and made some suggestions.”
Those “years of experience,” as Coats called them, include two decades of service in the House and the Senate in the 1980s and 90s, which preceded a four-year stint as U.S. Ambassador to Germany. He emerged from retirement in 2010 to run for his old seat in the upper chamber and won a six-year term comfortably as part of the Tea Party wave into Washington. But Coats, 73, announced in early 2015 he wouldn’t seek reelection. “It has nothing to do with a terribly dysfunctional Senate. It is related to the fact that I had to face the reality of age,” he told Indiana political outlet Howey Politics at the time. “There is a seven in front of the next digit. After a campaign and six more years in the Senate, I would be four months shy of 80 years old.”
A source who knows Coats well says that’s not an issue today. “This man’s a patriot, and he definitely has at least one more good fight left in him,” the source said.
Coats would figure to be a strong and noncontroversial choice for DNI, which heads the U.S. intelligence community, including the CIA and NSA. The political veteran, who served in the U.S. Army prior to his congressional career, is respected on both sides of the aisle and by the national security community. His stature would likely help secure an easy confirmation process.
Other names that have been floated for the job include Navy Admiral and current NSA chief Mike Rogers, and former U.S. Homeland Security Advisor Frances Townsend.
