News agencies are reporting that now-retired Sen. Dan Coats will be selected as Donald Trump's director of national intelligence. Let's meet him.
Sen. Dan Coats, R-Ind., wrote four tweets Monday evening in opposition to Donald Trump's call earlier in the day to prevent all foreign Muslims from entering the United States.
"Once again, Donald Trump has chosen bombastic rhetoric over sound judgment," Coats tweeted about the leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination.
Whoops, our mistake—those comments were from a year ago. Now Coats has exchanged his last scraps of integrity for pocket change and a ticket on the Trump Train. He'll be tasked, like so many of Trump's other nominees, largely with gutting the infrastructure he's being appointed to.
Mr. Coats, a mild-mannered conservative who served on the Senate Intelligence and Armed Services Committees, would be stepping into a position that some in Mr. Trump’s orbit believe is superfluous. Mr. Trump has named a more hard-charging conservative, Representative Mike Pompeo, to be his director of central intelligence.
Trump specifically believes the Office of the Director of National Intelligence “has become bloated and politicized.” His distaste for the position, and for much of the rest of the intelligence community, is based on his own (mentally unbalanced) belief that the intelligence community is dumb and he iz smarter than all of them put together, and is based even more on his personal narcissistic pique over intelligence agencies tarnishing his election win by continuing to investigate Russia's involvement even though he doesn't want them to.
So Trump's team is looking to scale back American intelligence agencies until they no longer upset him. That's the task Dan Coats is signing up for.