![]() Within the intelligence community, his appointment elicited relief but also worry: “From the very beginning,” one former senior intelligence official told me, “there was a lot of consternation over not getting Maguire fired.” One issue looming over the new acting director was the fact that the N.I.E., which had yet to be finalized, contained a conclusion that the president had often railed against. Maguire had served under eight presidents in a military or government capacity. Joseph Maguire, who at the time was director of the National Counterterrorism Center. ![]() During those conversations, Coats told me, the president never explained what prompted his sudden decision.Ĭoats’s interim successor would be retired Vice Adm. In the days to come, Coats’s regular meetings with Trump on intelligence matters continued. So it surprised him when on July 28, not long after he was approached about the change to the N.I.E., Trump announced via Twitter that Coats’s last day in office would be Aug. “But I said, ‘No, we need to stick to what the analysts have said.’”Ĭoats had been director of national intelligence since early in Trump’s presidency, but his tenure had been rocky at times, and earlier that year, he and Trump agreed to part ways Coats expected to resign near the end of September. “I can affirm that one of my staffers who was aware of the controversy requested that I modify that assessment,” Coats told me recently. Eventually, this debate made it to Coats’s desk. that summer, in particular the “back and forth,” as Dan Coats, then the director of national intelligence, put it, over the assessment that Russia favored Trump in 2020. The president’s displeasure with any suggestion that he was Putin’s favorite factored into the discussion over the N.I.E. (Bolton and Mulvaney declined to comment for this article.) Everyone in the White House knew that, and so you just didn’t talk about that with him.” According to this former adviser, both John Bolton and Mick Mulvaney, who were Trump’s national security adviser and acting chief of staff in 2019, went to considerable lengths to keep the subject of Russian election interference off the president’s agenda. As a former senior adviser to Trump, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told me, “You couldn’t have any conversation about Russia and the election without the president assuming you were calling his election into question. Yet Trump never accepted this and often actively disputed it, judging officials who expressed such a view to be disloyal. But when asked by a reporter if he had wanted Trump to win, he replied bluntly: “Yes, I did.” At a news conference with Trump in Helsinki in July 2018, President Vladimir Putin of Russia denied interfering in the election. and the National Security Agency that found Russia had interfered in the 2016 presidential election and aspired to help Trump. intelligence agencies, released a report drawing on intelligence from the C.I.A., the F.B.I. In 2017, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the umbrella entity supervising the 16 other U.S. On its face, Key Judgment 2 was not a contentious assertion. president.” To allay any speculation that Putin’s interest in Trump had cooled, Key Judgment 2 was substantiated by current information from a highly sensitive foreign source described by someone who read the N.I.E. ![]() But Bort explained to his colleagues, according to notes taken by one participant in the process, that this reflected not a genuine preference for Sanders but rather an effort “to weaken that party and ultimately help the current U.S. The intelligence provided to the N.I.E.’s authors indicated that in the lead-up to 2020, Russia worked in support of the Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders as well. began by enumerating the authors’ “key judgments.” Key Judgment 2 was that in the 2020 election, Russia favored the current president: Donald Trump. It was compiled by a working group consisting of about a dozen senior analysts, led by Christopher Bort, a veteran national intelligence officer with nearly four decades of experience, principally focused on Russia and Eurasia. elections: the 2020 presidential contest and 2024’s as well. ran to about 15 pages, with another 10 pages of appendices and source notes.Īccording to multiple officials who saw it, the document discussed Russia’s ongoing efforts to influence U.S. N.I.E.s are intended to be that community’s most authoritative class of top-secret document, reflecting its consensus judgment on national-security matters ranging from Iran’s nuclear capabilities to global terrorism. In early July of last year, the first draft of a classified document known as a National Intelligence Estimate circulated among key members of the agencies making up the U.S. To hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. ![]()
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