Former Indiana lawmaker and member of the Senate intelligence committee has been banned from entering Russia: ‘I’m not a big fan of Putin’

This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

President-elect Donald Trump will appoint the former Indiana senator Dan Coats as director of national intelligence, it was reported on Thursday.

The pick could be announced later this week, according to a person briefed on the decision who spoke to the Associated Press.

The person was not authorized to speak publicly about the matter and spoke on condition of anonymity. The New York Times and Washington Post also reported the nomination, citing Trump transition officials speaking anonymously.

Coats, a member of the Senate intelligence committee as an Indiana legislator from 2011 to 2017, has held several positions that put him out of step with the emerging Trump administration.

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Whereas Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin have expressed mutual respect, leading many in the US and Russia to expect a diplomatic thaw, Russia banned Coats from entering the country in 2014, to retaliate against US sanctions. Coats proclaimed himself “honored” to be blacklisted.



“I’m not a big fan of Putin,” he said in a November 2015 Senate floor speech. “I’m not a big fan of Russia.”

Yet in the same speech, Coats expressed openness to partnering with Russia against Islamic State, a position Trump has expressed, despite the Russian military intervention in Syria focusing on bolstering dictator Bashar Assad, not fighting Isis.

“As we’ve learned in 1941, national emergencies can create strange bedfellows,” Coats said.

Such bedfellows, Coats said, would not include only the Russians, but also “Sunni nations – it has to include Islamists who believe that their faith and their culture is being perverted brutally by Isis”. His stance is unlikely to be shared by Trump national security adviser Mike Flynn, who has called “Islamic ideology sick”.

Coats has also vigorously endorsed CIA efforts to arm Syrian rebels, another position Trump has opposed. While Trump has described aerial bombing as a cornerstone of his military approach to Isis, Coats said in the same floor speech that “military history shows air action only cannot achieve the goal of defeating an enemy”.

The prospective nomination comes amid reports, denied by Trump spokesman Sean Spicer, that the president-elect is considering an overhaul to US intelligence that would diminish the role Coats is said to be tapped to fill. Previous directors of national intelligence, a position barely a decade old, have clashed with CIA directors over the limits of either’s authority.

The outgoing director of national intelligence, James Clapper, on Thursday pledged to produce next week a declassified intelligence report providing evidence of Russian interference in the US election, a claim rejected by Trump that has spurred a dramatic split with the intelligence apparatus Coats may soon helm.

Trump has dismissed the assessment of Russian hacking as an attack on the validity of his election.

Testifying alongside Clapper to a Senate committee, National Security Agency director Adm Michael Rogers warned that the split with Trump risked creating “a situation where our workforce decides to walk”.

Trump will meet with directors of the FBI and CIA, as well as Clapper, on Friday, to be briefed on their findings.

Coats is a conservative who spent 16 non-consecutive years in the Senate. He announced his retirement last year and did not seek re-election.



Coats and Trump are more closely in line on the detention facility Guantánamo Bay, which both believe ought to remain open.

In February 2016, Coats called Guantánamo “a valuable tool in our counter-terrorism efforts”; Trump has talked about “load[ing] it up with some bad dudes.”

On Thursday, the Obama administration transferred four detainees to Saudi Arabia, dropping the population of the wartime prison to 55 men.

Coats was also harshly critical of a landmark 2014 Senate intelligence committee investigation into CIA torture, something Trump has mused about restoring.

Although the report, which relied on more than 6m pages of internal agency records, was one of the most thorough in the history of the Senate, Coats called it an “unconstructive partisan account of the last decade’s counterterrorism efforts”.

Additionally, Coats attacked Edward Snowden’s NSA disclosures in a June 2013 Wall Street Journal op-ed, calling bulk NSA surveillance “legal, constitutional and used only under the strict oversight of all three branches of the government”.

Multiple federal judges would later rule that the bulk collection of US phone records is illegal, but Coats voted against a 2015 bill, the USA Freedom Act, that constrained the mass surveillance.

Mike Pompeo, Trump’s nominee for CIA director, has also supported expansive surveillance.