The next day, March 22, Trump asked Dan Coats, a former Indiana senator who had succeeded Clapper as the director of national intelligence, and Mike Pompeo, who had succeeded Brennan as CIA director, to speak alone with him in the Oval Office after his morning intelligence briefing. In an extraordinary request to aid him politically, Trump asked the country’s top two intelligence officials if they would say publicly that no link existed between Trump and Russia. Coats responded that his office had nothing to do with criminal investigations and it was not his role to make public statements
...more
