The director of national intelligence for the United States admitted that he is unaware of what happened in the one-on-one meeting between President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
When asked by NBC News’ Andrea Mitchell about the two-hour meeting between the two men in Helsinki, Finland, on Monday, Dan Coats said: “Well you’re right. I don’t know what happened in that meeting.”
“If he had asked me how that ought to be conducted, I would have suggested a different way,” Coats said during the interview at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado. “But that’s not my role, that’s not my job. It is what it is.”
[DNI Dan Coats on Russian interference statement: ‘I was just doing my job’]
Only translators were present in the meeting.
Coats said that as “time goes by,” Trump will reveal more more of what transpired in the meeting — though it is the president’s prerogative to do so.
“That risk is always there,” Coats admitted to laughs when asked if Russia could have secretly recorded the meeting.
During the interview, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a tweet that Trump asked national security adviser John Bolton “to invite President Putin to Washington in the fall and those discussions are already underway.”
When Mitchell told Coats about the tweet, he replied: “Say that again?”
“Okay. That’s going to be special,” he added immediately.
Later in the interview, Coats said he was unaware that the White House had invited the Russian leader, and said he would suggest they do not have another one-on-one meeting like that in Helsinki.
