Nothing to do with revelations about golfer Arnold Palmer. Worth noting that after Coats left the Senate, he became a lobbyist at King & Spalding, the ATL mega-law firm where Chris Wray & Sally Yates were partners. Disinhibition has arrived.
Dan Coats, the US's former top intelligence official, thinks Russian President Vladimir Putin may have blackmail on US President Donald Trump, the veteran journalist Bob Woodward's upcoming book says.
According to CNN, which obtained an early copy of the book, 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."
"How else to explain the president's behavior?" Woodward wrote. "Coats could see no other explanation."
"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," Woodward wrote. "But he could not shake them."
[...]
The US intelligence community determined in early 2017 that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election to propel Trump to the Oval Office. Coats and other intelligence officials testified to Congress last year that Russia was one of the biggest national security threats facing the US ahead of the 2020 election and that it would continue employing the tactics it used in 2016 and during the 2018 midterm elections.
https://t.co/5jBS9mY31a
Why it matters: Coats was the president's top intelligence official from March 2017 until August 2019. Woodward reports that Coats and his staff examined the intelligence regarding Trump's ties to Russia "as carefully as possible" and that he "still questions the relationship" between Trump and Putin despite the apparent absence of intelligence proof.
Between the lines: The New York Times' Michael Schmidt reported in his new book that former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein secretly curtailed an FBI counterintelligence probe into Trump's ties to Russia, meaning the full scope of decades of the president's personal and financial dealings there has never been explored.
The big picture: The explosive Woodward book, which is based in part on 18 interviews that Trump sat for with the veteran journalist, details the "tortured" tenure of Coats and other officials described by the Washington Post as "so-called adults of the Trump orbit" — including former Defense Secretary James Mattis and former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.
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