Fired FBI Director James Comey’s recent testimony to Congress suggested that one of the primary reasons Donald Trump was exasperated with Comey’s handling of the Russia 2016 investigation was that Comey refused to announce publicly that the president himself was not personally the subject of a counterintelligence inquiry. Now CNN is reporting that National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats have confirmed earlier media reports and told investigators that Trump asked them to announce that his campaign had not colluded with Russia:
Two of the nation’s top intelligence officials told Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team and Senate investigators, in separate meetings last week, that President Donald Trump suggested they say publicly there was no collusion between his campaign and the Russians, according to multiple sources.
The question of whether there was collusion between the Trump camp and Russia is the subject of Mueller’s investigation (which was previously an FBI investigation), so Trump’s request was both premature, self-serving, and a bit random given that neither Rogers nor Coats are in charge of determining whether collusion took place.
Coats and Rogers appear to be trying to walk a pretty fine line, though, apparently insisting that they weren’t bothered at all that the president went outside the chain of command to ask them to announce that he was innocent of an accusation that has not yet been fully investigated: “Sources said that neither Coats nor Rogers raised concerns that Trump was pushing them to do something they did not want to do,” CNN says, adding that the two men apparently “did not feel that the President pressured either of them to do anything improper.”
Yes, just normal stuff, all of this.
