HERE'S YOUR COATS, WHAT'S YOUR HURRY?:

Trump is still "enraged" about Coats's congressional testimony on national security threats last month, believing that the director undercut the president's authority when he shared intelligence assessments about Iran, North Korea and the Islamic State that are at odds with many of Trump's public statements, said one adviser who spoke with the president over the weekend. [...]

Last July, Coats was being interviewed onstage at the annual Aspen Security Forum when the White House announced via tweet that Russian President Vladi­mir Putin had been invited to Washington.

Coats was clearly taken by surprise and made little effort to hide his displeasure.

"Okaaaay," Coats said. "That's going to be special." The audience erupted in laughter.

In the same interview, with NBC News's Andrea Mitchell, Coats also said no one had asked him if it was a good idea for Trump to meet privately with Putin at a summit meeting in Helsinki. Trump didn't allow any Cabinet officials or aides to attend the meeting, and several officials have said they couldn't get a reliable account of the conversation between the two leaders, which was attended only by two interpreters, The Washington Post has reported.

Coats said that he hadn't been told what happened in the meeting. If asked, he said, he'd have advised the president against speaking one-on-one with Putin and that U.S. security officials were concerned there were no notes taken.

Asked whether it was possible Putin had secretly recorded the more-than-two-hour meeting, Coats answered, "That risk is always there."

Trump was livid, and believed that Coats was trying to embarrass him in a room filled with high-ranking current and former national security officials, many of them outspoken critics of the president, a senior U.S. official said at the time.

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