Former DNI Daniel Coats criticizes suspension of in-person briefings to Congress on election security
By Ellen Nakashima
September 9, 2020 at 5:58 p.m. EDT
Daniel Coats, a former head of the intelligence community, warned Wednesday that the Trump administration’s move to roll back in-person briefings to Congress on foreign threats to the 2020 election undermines the agencies’ mission and efforts to safeguard the vote.
“It’s imperative that the intelligence community keep Congress fully informed about the threats to our elections and share as much information as possible while protecting sources and methods,” the former director of national intelligence said in an interview.
Coats’s stern warning came in response to Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe’s notifying Congress a week and a half ago that he was suspending in-person briefings to lawmakers, though the Senate Intelligence Committee’s acting chairman said his panel will continue to receive such updates.
ODNI will switch to written briefings of Congress on foreign threats to the election
Whatever the case, Coats said, “these briefings in person should be delivered to both the Senate and the House oversight committees and also should be delivered to the duly elected members of the House and Senate at the appropriate classification level when directed by the bipartisan leadership of both the House and the Senate.” He added: “We must stand united in defending the election security process from being corrupted and ensure that a vote cast is a vote counted.”
Coats, who was forced out by President Trump last summer, has for months mostly kept silent. But as the official who in 2019 established the intelligence community’s program to coordinate briefings on foreign election threats, he said he felt obliged to speak publicly.
“We’ve got to get this process back in place,” he said. “Designating it to one committee and not the other and shutting down all members briefings is the wrong thing to do.”
As a Republican U.S. senator from Indiana, Coats took part in many all-member briefings, especially in his second stint from 2011 to 2017, where each senator was afforded an opportunity to raise a question, he said. “ ‘What did you mean when you said, ‘X’? ‘Wait a minute, so-and-so said something else,’ “ he said. “It is that back and forth” that makes in-person hearings valuable.
Coats spoke on the heels of the publication of an opinion piece by his former deputy, Sue Gordon, in The Washington Post, in which she decried how “the national conversation around election security has turned vitriolic, diversionary and unhelpful, and we are doing our enemies’ work for them.”
In a veiled allusion to Trump’s attacks on the intelligence community, Gordon wrote that “when intelligence assessments are described as biased, when federal institutions are decried as inept or corrupt, when vague fears of widespread tampering with our physical election infrastructure are advanced, and when disagreement over policy and approach turns to accusation of illegitimacy, our enemies’ destructive goals are advanced as we busily attack ourselves.”
Coats said he “absolutely” agreed with Gordon, who served 31 years as an intelligence officer. “[Russian] President [Vladimir] Putin ought to be very happy with the way this is turning out,” Coats said. “He can only view his efforts as successful.”
more:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/former-dni-daniel-coats-criticizes-suspension-of-in-person-briefings-to-congress-on-election-security/2020/09/09/ef5a6d60-f2ae-11ea-b796-2dd09962649c_story.html
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