Trump Orders Intelligence Officials To Publicly Refute Russian Collusion
Some of the top intelligence officials testified in front of the Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team and Senate investigators, last week where they told the committee that President Donald Trump has told them to publicly refute the fact that there was any collusion between his campaign and the Russians. However, the officials decided to not heed the President's alleged order and testified honestly instead.
Two intelligence chiefs let it slip that the president had urged them to publicly deny that there existed any collusions between the Trump administration and Russian officials, a piece of information that really surprised Mueller and his team, according to a CNN report.
Director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats and National Security Agency Director, Mike Rogers, who were interviewed by the special counsel, earlier in June, specified that even though they did not always have comfortable interactions with the president, they do not believe that at any point Trump had asked them to interfere in the ongoing Russian investigation, carried out by FBI.
"In the three-plus years that I have been the director of the National Security Agency, to the best of my recollection, I have never been directed to do anything I believe to be illegal, immoral, unethical or inappropriate, and to the best of my recollection during that same period of service I do not recall ever feeling pressured to do so," Rogers said during the hearing, CNN reported.
"In my time of service, which is interacting with the President of the United States or anybody in his administration, I have never been pressured — I have never felt pressured — to intervene or interfere in any way with shaping intelligence in a political way or in relation to an ongoing investigation," Coats said.
President Donald Trump speaks during a meeting in the Cabinet Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., June 12, 2017. Photo: Getty Images/ Olivier Douliery-Pool
Even though both Rogers and Coats participated in joint and individual hearings with Mueller, the team of investigators could not extract many details about the interactions between the president and the intelligence officials. According to the CNN report, one of the reasons for the officials being vague could be because neither Rogers nor Coats had any idea about how much information they are allowed to reveal.
The report states that these intelligence chiefs had asked the White House whether the conversation they had with Trump would fall under executive privilege. Having received no definitive answer regarding the matter from the White House, Coats and Rogers decided to play it safe and refused to divulge in specifics during their testimony, which frustrated both the Senate as well as the special counsel.
Read: Russia Investigation Update: Inquiry Just Beginning, Schiff Says
The question of executive privilege also puzzled the Senate Intelligence Committee during Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ testimony, June 13. Sessions kept on refusing to give a straight answer to most of the questions asked by the senate members by claiming that the interactions between him and the president is covered under executive privilege, even though the latter had not exercised the same before Sessions’ testimony started.
“I’m protecting the president’s constitutional right by not giving it away before he has a chance to view it and weigh it,” he said during the hearing, the New York Times reported.
At the time Sessions said that there was “a longstanding policy of the Department of Justice not to comment on conversations that the attorney general has had with the president,” which, as it later turned out, was just a general practice rather than a written rule.
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