Trump Asks Intelligence Chiefs Coats and Rogers to Publicly Deny Russia Collusion Evidence - Obstruction of Investigation

On March 22, 2017—just two days after FBI Director Comey publicly confirmed the Russia investigation—President Trump called Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and NSA Director Mike Rogers into separate meetings and asked them to publicly state there was no evidence of collusion between his campaign and Russia. During a White House meeting, Trump asked everyone except Coats and CIA Director Mike Pompeo to leave the room, then asked Coats to intervene with Comey to get the FBI to back off the Russia investigation. In a separate conversation with Rogers, Trump made a similar request to publicly deny collusion. Both intelligence chiefs were so disturbed by the inappropriate requests that they documented them in contemporaneous memos and exchanged notes about their conversations with the president. Rogers documented the conversation in an internal NSA memo written by a senior official. However, neither official believed they were being asked to do something illegal enough to report to authorities—they characterized it as a public relations request rather than an explicit directive to lie. Both refused Trump’s requests. When the Washington Post reported the incidents in May 2017 and Coats appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee on May 23, he refused to confirm or deny the reports, stating he did not feel it appropriate to characterize discussions and conversations with the president. The requests represented textbook obstruction of justice: a president asking intelligence officials to publicly exonerate him from an ongoing criminal investigation. The Mueller Report would later document these incidents as part of ten episodes of potential obstruction by Trump.