Today, Explained - Coats checks out

Episode Date: July 30, 2019

Dan Coats is resigning, leaving a vacancy at the top of US intelligence. The Washington Post’s Shane Harris explains how his replacement may be a Trump loyalist who believes in a “deep state” conspiracy against the president. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Shane Harris, intelligence and national security reporter at The Washington Post. Whenever someone gets bumped from the Trump cabinet, we ask, one, was it a surprise? And two, did this person get fired? So was it a surprise to hear that the director of national intelligence will be leaving? Definitely not a surprise. Dan Coats had been a dead man walking, I'm afraid to say, for some time, really more than a year. It had been clear that he had had some pretty public points of friction with the president. They didn't always get along. I think the president found him a bit annoying in some instances. And there had been stories percolating over the past several months that Trump was about to get rid of Coats.

So when the deal was finally done over the weekend, it was something that people had been anticipating for a while. It didn't come as a shock. Does that mean, question two, that he got fired? He did not get fired. If you read the resignation letter that he wrote on Sunday, and you know, our initial reporting, I think bears this out. He and Trump had discussed this previously, they'd come to an agreement that it was time for him to go. So I think you would count that as a resignation. That said, you know, the backdrop to all of this is that the president wasn't particularly thrilled

with Dan Coats as the DNI. So the writing had been on the wall. But when it finally comes down to the moment that Coats decides to leave, I think he can say truthfully that he did tender his resignation and the president accepted it. Why did Trump pick Coats in the first place? That is a great question. I guess the point of why does Trump pick anyone for some of these jobs? When Coats was tapped for this, and it was back in January, I mean as the new administration was just taking root, he I think was seen as someone who had the gravitas of kind of an elder statesman. He had served twice with the U.S. in going after Al-Qaeda. And there had been, remember, Al-Qaeda cells there in Germany. So he had a real grounding in statecraft and foreign

policy and intelligence, and I think was seen as somebody who obviously could get confirmed. He was a Republican senator, but kind of would be a wise steward or a caretaker of that position. So when was the first time this relationship showed signs of where? I think the first time was after President Trump met in Helsinki back in June of 2018 with Russian President Vladimir Putin. He stood famously up at this press conference with Putin and essentially disavowed a lot of the U.S. intelligence community's findings about Russia and its interference in the election. My people came to me, Dan Coats came to me and some others, they said they think it's Russia. I have President Putin. He just said it's not Russia. I will say this, I don't see any reason why it would be. Russia and regarding election interference. And I think that that was seen as, you know, him obviously trying to, you know, set the record very straight so that there was no

ambiguity about what the intelligence community had actually concluded. And this was an assessment that had been reached, yes, under the Obama administration. But I think Coats also wanted to make clear that this was not a political judgment. This is just the truth as the intelligence agencies see it. And I don't think he wanted any confusion on that point, given the, you know, huge spectacle that the president had created in that press conference. So that was sort of the first instance of Coates clashing with the president on paper. But then he did it like up on stage in front of a live audience too, right? Right. About a month later, Coates goes to speak at this

event called the Aspen Security Forum. He's sitting on a stage in front of several hundred national security elite being interviewed by NBC's Andrea Mitchell, who reads him a very interesting tweet. We have some breaking news. The White House has announced on Twitter that Vladimir Putin is coming to the White House in the fall. And you could see in Dan Kostin and Heide that this was the first he'd heard of it, which was pretty astonishing. Say that again. Vladimir Putin. Did I hear you? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That's going to be special.

Vintage Trump administration, it feels like now. And it was a little bit of a moment. It was lighthearted. It was also kind of Coates looking at the room thinking, you know, like, my life. But, you know, he wasn't overtly being hostile to the president. He was actually supporting a lot of his policies in the conversation. But then it kind of came around to the Helsinki summit. And Andrea Mitchell asked him. In Helsinki, the president was alone with Vladimir Putin for two hours, more than two hours, with only translators. How do you have any idea what happened in that meeting? Well, you're right. I don any idea what happened in that meeting?

Well, you're right. I don't know what happened in that meeting, but that is the president's prerogative. If he had asked me how that ought to be conducted, I would have suggested a different way. But that's not my role. That's not my job. So it is what it is. The White House was furious about this. I remember that afternoon, the White House just erupting and having to quickly try and file something on this very clear rift that had broken out, where you could see that Dan Coats was not the kind of guy who was going to cover publicly for the president. And he wasn't going to stake his own reputation and integrity as a truth teller just to cover up for an indiscreet tweet or what he thought was a bad decision by the president to meet privately with the Russian president. And we all know the president values loyalty above all else. How did their relationship progress after that first very public sort of fissure?

I think you could probably describe it as hot and cold. The next really big public rift we saw was a few months back when Coats testified at what's called the Global Threats or the Worldwide Threats Hearing, which is this annual meeting of all the intelligence chiefs who publicly testify before Congress about all the big global hotspots. I first would like to mention election security. This has been and will continue to be a top priority for the intelligence community. We assess that foreign actors will view the 2020 U.S. elections as an opportunity to advance their interests. And he essentially came out and said, you know, Iran is complying with the nuclear agreement not to build weapons. We don't think North Korea is going to give up its nuclear weapons. These were things that were running very contrary to positions that the president has taken. And it was another moment where he seemed't see any sense that it really recovered. There are officials I've talked to have said, oh, you know, they have good days and the

president likes them and he respects them. But you couldn't get past this fundamental idea of Coats as somebody who was just not going to carry water for Donald Trump and was not going to go out of his way to praise him and was certainly not going to deliver an assessment about the intelligence community's judgments just because it wasn't what the president wanted to hear. Do we know exactly why this is happening now? Is it because it's a safe enough distance away from any previous incidents or clashes? So now the optics are better?

It's still not clear to me exactly why right now. It's not the best time, actually, necessarily for the president to propose a nominee, I suppose, because we're heading into an August recess. And I would imagine it's going to at least be into mid-September before, at the earliest before there's a confirmation hearing. So that kind of hangs out there for a while. I suspect we'll probably learn more about this. You know, there was a little bit of prolonged agony in all of this. Everyone was just sort of waiting for the shoe to drop. Why Coates ultimately decided this was the right timing, not entirely clear, but everything that we've heard so far suggests that he put the ball boss, nothing like the old boss. Hello? Hello, is this Jason?

This is Jason. Jason, this is Sean. Yeah, hey, hi, how are you? I'm doing great. How are you? Excellent. We share something in common, Jason. Not only do we both work for Vox Media, but we both host podcasts now, is that right? I thought you were going to say we both have gray hair, but that's only me, probably. No, it's both of us, too.

We have so much in common. Oh, my God. Best friends. I guess I'm calling you to find out a bit more about your show, which is called Land of the Giants, the Rise of Amazon from the Recode, from the Vox. Tell people about the show. The show's trying to take a look at how Amazon built itself into the huge power it is today, and then examine sort of the ramifications of that power. So first episodes about Amazon

Prime, and then I also have an episode about their relationship with Wall Street, which is sort of has given them the freedom to do things that traditional retailers have never, ever done. So to build new services like Alexa and Amazon has been able to do that because they've convinced Wall Street from day one that we're not going to have profits in the short term. But trust us, we're going to grow into this mammoth company and you're going to be happy sometime in the future. Beautiful. All right. Land of the Giants. People can what? Find it and subscribe and listen right now? They can listen right now to the trailer as well as episodes one and two. And we're going to have seven episodes in total coming out every Tuesday. Did you get Bezos?

Did you try to get Bezos? What did Bezos say? I mean, I'm saying there's a chance. Shane, how important is the job of director of national intelligence? It's not that old a position, right? It's not a very old position. And it's important to remember that the whole notion behind it, it grows out of the 9-11 attacks and this understanding that one of the causes of the attacks was this failure of the intelligence community and law enforcement to connect the dots about the attacks because they weren't communicating with each other. The NSA knew things about Al-Qaeda. The FBI knew some

things. The CIA knew some things. And they weren't operating as a team not effectively enough. And the idea with the DNI was we need someone to sit over all these agencies and kind of be the team coach, the coordinator. What many people feel though has happened in practice is that we kind of have added another layer of bureaucracy onto an already big and unwieldy bureaucracy and that do we really genuinely need this position or do we just create one more layer that's not really making the community more effective? Some people defend it, but you won't find, I think, a consensus viewpoint

that it's a great thing to have. But the DNI does sit on top of everything else. It's someone who talks to all the heads of all the intelligence agencies and then conveys things back to the president, right? That's right. Which makes sense to me in theory, especially after 9-11. Is that how it works in theory or is that how it works in practice? That's often how it works in practice. Yeah, I mean, I guess the way to look at it is you have influence based on who you are and on your clout, your ability to talk publicly in a relationship with the president. Your influence is arguably weaker when it comes

to actually managing all of these different intelligence fiefdoms and bureaucracies and telling them what they can do and what they shouldn't do. The position's been around for what, about 15 years now? Has someone just crushed it as DNI? I think most people would tell you that Jim Clapper in the Obama administration was the ideal. Somebody who was a career intelligence officer, which means that was their job, right? They did this for a living. He was a military intelligence officer,

but he'd worked in other agencies. He'd run another intelligence agency. And so he really had the whole systemic view of how these 17 agencies are supposed to work together and what they do and how in many ways they have distinct missions that they should be let to go pursue on their own to some degree and who had gravitas and had real credibility. I mean, nobody doubted that Jim Clapper knew the intelligence community. He lived it and breathed it and was very much seen as apolitical, not on the side of one party or one president. So how does a James Clapper compare to say John Ratcliffe, President Trump's pick to replace Coats?

Night and day. Congressman Ratcliffe doesn't have a background in intelligence. He was, for a short period, he was the U. the US attorney in the Eastern District of Texas and held a position in its national security division out there, which is kind of adjacent to intelligence issues. But he wasn't in it for a long time and being – we should say being a lawyer or a prosecutor is not the same as managing a giant bureaucracy. And the other thing too, with Congressman Ratcliffe, he's made very clear that he's a supporter politically of the president and probably is most well known in the past year or so as being one of the group of Republican congressmen who believes that the Russia investigation, which became the Mueller probe, may have had some kind of corrupt origin. So remember, Maria, how bad it was when we all found out there was this unverified dossier that was used as a basis to gain a warrant to surveil someone associated with the Trump campaign, Carter Page. And it got worse when we found out that that dossier was paid for

by Hillary Clinton and the DNC. These kind of touch points that people on the right who believe that the Russia investigation is sort of the fruit of a poison tree keep returning back to. Congressman Ratcliffe has used his time on judiciary and intelligence committees to quiz the FBI director, the attorney general, most recently Bob Mueller when he testified last week. You wrote 180 pages, 180 pages about decisions that weren't reached, about potential crimes that weren't charged or decided. And respectfully, respectfully, by doing that, you managed to violate every principle and the most sacred of traditions about prosecutors not offering extra prosecutorial analysis about potential crimes that aren't charged. So Americans need to know this as they listen to the Democrats and socialists on the other side of the aisle, as they do dramatic readings from this report.

Is it going to be an awkward match to put someone who's sort of breathing life into Mueller report conspiracy theories at the head of the entire intelligence apparatus in this country? Oh, it's going to be enormously awkward. You know, people within the intelligence community are, you know, very sensitive to this allegation that the president has been making for some time and that many of his allies have that there was some kind of deep state conspiracy against candidate Trump and then continuing into his administration. So when you take somebody who is from that camp and who is, you know, very much inherently associated with this conspiracy theory and you put them in charge of the entire intelligence community, that's not going to

gel. There's going to be a real concern within these agencies about how do we respond to this. The danger is, I think, twofold. One is that you create the public impression, and maybe it ends up being true, that the intelligence community has become politicized. That it is there, at least at the leadership level, to respond to the president's preferences and desires. And then sort of stemming from that, the concern that the intelligence director would not tell it straight to the president when he needed to know certain hard truths. And to that point, there was a statement that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell

put out on Sunday. You know, Mitch McConnell, obviously a very stalwart supporter of the president, you would think would probably be someone who'd be voting for whoever he nominates as DNI. But in this long statement, praising his friend and former Senate colleague, Dan Coats, for the great job he said he did, there's this last bit in here that I thought was interesting. He said, the US intelligence community works best when it is led by professionals who protect its work from political or analytical bias, and who deliver unvarnished truths to

political leaders in both the executive and legislative branches. Very often the news these its work from political or analytical bias and who deliver unvarnished truths to political leaders in both the executive and legislative branches. Very often the news these briefings bring is unpleasant, but it is essential that we be confronted with the facts. So, you know, it's difficult to imagine a big brawl between the White House and the Senate and particularly under Mitch McConnell. But it is just notable to me that he is trying to send this signal that, you know, we, through our advice and consent function, are going to play a role here. And we have a pretty clear idea of what we expect the DNI to do.

Shane Harris is a reporter at The Washington Post. He's also the author of The Watchers, The Rise of America's Surveillance State. I'm Sean Ramos from This Is Today Explained. Afim Shapiro is the show's engineer. Noam Hassenfeld, Bridget McCarthy, Halima Shah, and Amina Alsadi produce the show. And Irene Noguchi is our executive producer. Alex Pena and Will Reed are interning with us all summer. And the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder sees us through all the seasons. Today Explained is produced in association with Stitcher, and we are part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.