Intelligence officials decline to discuss Trump conversations
Senators express frustration during committee hearing
WASHINGTON — Two of the nation’s top intelligence officials declined in a testy hearing Wednesday to discuss the specifics of private conversations with President Trump, refusing to say whether they had been asked to push back against an FBI probe into possible coordination between Trump’s campaign and the Russian government.
Testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats demurred when asked whether it was true, as The Washington Post reported Tuesday, that Trump asked Coats if he could intervene with then-FBI Director James Comey to get him to back off the bureau’s focus on Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser.
“I don’t believe it’s appropriate for me to address that in a public session,” Coats said. “I don’t think this is the appropriate venue to do this in.”
Similarly, National Security Agency Director Michael Rogers declined to answer a question from Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., about whether Trump asked Rogers to deny the existence of any evidence showing coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia, as The Post reported last month.
“I’m not going to discuss the specifics of any conversations with the president of the United States,” Rogers said.
Instead, both men said they never felt pressure to do anything inappropriate or, in Coats’s case, to intervene in an ongoing probe.
Both men struggled to provide a consistent rationale for why they could not discuss the conversations with Trump in public. Rogers offered that the conversations were classified.
But when pressed by Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, he could not specify what was classified about the conversation.
The intelligence officials’ refusal to publicly address whether Trump asked them to downplay or somehow impede the investigation disturbed the committee’s Democrats, who were visibly frustrated.
Warner told Rogers the committee had “facts that there were other individuals” who were aware of his conversation with Trump and that a memo had been prepared “because of concerns” about the call.
In one particularly heated exchange, King lambasted the two intelligence officials for not offering a legal basis for refusing to discuss their discussions with the president about the Russia investigation.
The probe is now being led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, following Trump’s May 9 firing of Comey.
“It is my belief that you are inappropriately refusing to answer these questions today,” King said angrily.
“I think your unwillingness to answer a very basic question speaks volumes,” said Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M.
Coats said he didn’t have a specific legal justification for declining to answer such questions, but suggested he might be able to do so during a closed briefing.
Asked if he would be forthcoming in such a setting, Coats said he intended to be but did not know yet whether the White House would block such discussion by asserting that executive privilege covers his conversations with the president.
The exchange suggested the president could use executive privilege to prevent certain information from being shared with a congressional investigation into any possible coordination between Russia and Trump associates.