Jack Smith is adding
major new accusations
to the charges that Donald Trump
mishandled national security documents
after he left office.
All of this is putting the spotlight
on how the 45th president handled
classified and sensitive information.
I'm joined
now tonight
by someone who provided Trump
with near-daily intelligence
briefings in his first two years
in office.
The former
director of national intelligence,
Dan Coats.
And thank you so much for being here.
I think I should start by saying,
you know, we brought you on
to talk about election security,
something that you care deeply about.
And then obviously,
this breaking news happened
regarding your former boss.
I mean,
as the director of National Intelligence,
you did brief him on a daily basis.
Did you ever have concerns
about how he handled
classified information
or are you surprised by any of this?
Well, I assumed that his staff,
as my staff
did for me and everybody else,
remind him
that this is classified,
has to be careful
I didn't have a direct
talk with him on that.
Some of his chief of staff jacket, John
Kelly and others, so forth.
We're managing that.
So everybody assumed
that the president knew
the president
was aware of the fact that classification
mattered and of sacrosanct, really.
And a lot of times
people say, well,
what's the big deal about all of this?
If you walk into the lobby of the CIA
and look to the right wall,
you'll see a bunch of stars.
Their names are there
because they're recovered,
but they're dead
because somebody's got their names out.
Maybe on a classified document,
if you will, put
millions of dollars in to keep
the technology
for gathering intelligence.
And if that's
breached,
because somebody
gets a classified document
floating around the nose of it,
we lose that information
that we are grabbing.
So it's more than just a bunch of papers.
And what big deal is this and so forth?
Lives can be lost.
Money can be misspent.
We can be
our adversaries.
Are out there
searching,
trying to get this kind of information
because they want to undermine us.
These are
so we have these threats that come in.
And so it's
something that we remind
our people every day,
every time
every new person comes in
to the DNI
or to any other intelligence agency
you must do this.
You must take care of that.
Don't carry this around.
Put it in the safe before you leave.
There's deadly conflict.
It's yeah, there are deadly consequences.
And when you hear you,
what we've learned
about the new document,
it was it was related to a potential attack
plan on Iran.
I mean,
as you know,
you don't just draw up a new plan
like that
every day, regardless
of whether or not you're using it.
I mean,
the idea that the accusation
you was showing it to people
who didn't have security clearances
and those people
perhaps
wouldn't take a big deal
out of all of this.
There are people out there
that know
these other people know
they're going to a person,
whether it's the president,
whether it's the director
of national intelligence
or something else,
and buying off or trying to get it
information from something,
something like that.
So you never can be sure
it's classified for a reason.
Reasons classified
because we know others
to know what's happening
in a normal person,
a regular person like me,
if I took classified documents
or something
like this, would be prosecuted.
I mean, we see that happen
on a pretty regular people in prison
who have taken stuff home
when they knew
they shouldn't have taken home.
Maybe it was truly innocent,
but it's so critical
that we abide by the rules.
And obviously,
those of us in high
positions are surrounded
by people who know that
and so if I leave something on my desk,
walk out the door,
somebody runs
after me
or grabs
that and puts it back on the safe, say,
hey, you let that in the door,
let me go through my desk.
It's got to go back into the safe. Oops.
Sorry about that.
Yeah. And I take it
you don't think that classified
information belongs
at a private golf club?
That's for sure.
If you're in your resignation
letter in 2019,
you wrote
the intelligence community
is stronger than ever
and increasingly
well to meet new challenges
and opportunities.
You've been very vocal
in talking about the security of U.S.
elections and defending them
and just how important that is.
How do you convince people in this day
and age that
their votes are safe,
that they're not being manipulated
when the person you used to work for
is saying on a daily basis that
that they were,
you know,
the intelligence community
deals before the
threats to the United States.
We know the Russians
have tried to undermine our democracy
in many, many different ways.
We know the Chinese have done that.
The Iranians and other
and other enemies have done that.
And they do it
through various
methods cyber and spreading through media
and so forth,
all kinds of conspiracy theories
and undermining the intent, the integrity
of our government,
of who we are, and more than that,
undermining our democracy.
We've had 250 years
of the most amazing country
in the history of the world
and wasn't it, Franklin said, you know,
what did we just have
our founding fathers give us,
gave us a republic if we can keep it.
And so what I'm really concerned
and why I'm so gauged in terms
of thanking you for letting me talk about
finally ensuring our public
that we are doing
everything we possibly can to prevent
whether it's foreign or
whether it's domestic
people who are trying
to undermine our democracy.
Because if we lose that,
we lose everything.
We become a third world country.
Yes.
Which party just is
with which party is the one that has
done the most damage
to take over and then never give up?
So it's all tied into this.
But election security,
the American people
have to have confidence
in what we've done.
And I can tell you a lot of things
about what we have done
to ensure that everybody's vote
is legitimate.
But he knew that.
I mean,
we have reported that
in the other investigation,
Jacksonville is looking into
Trump got a briefing in the Oval Office
February 2020 was told what
intelligence agencies
and your former colleagues
had done to secure the election.
And months later he's the leader
spreading conspiracies
about that
and making people feel like their
votes weren't safe.
Well, my role was to
provide to the best of our ability
the basic facts
of what threats were to America
and what things we needed
he needed to be aware of,
and the staff needed to be aware of
situations that would be undermining
our very,
very wonderful democracy that we have.
And so
what was done after
my job was to present it to them
my job was not to implement policy,
but we wanted the president to know
exactly what was happening
to the best of our abilities. Yeah.
And what did you think
when I mean, your concern was that people
you said this
before the election,
that people would come on
election night
would would be upset that those weren't
the results
as votes were still being counted.
He came down
and said,
I won the election
before the votes had all been counted.
I mean, what went through your mind
when you heard that?
Well, I
knew we had there not a major effort.
I took a lead as DNI
with our intelligence agencies
to put a
group together of top people
from each of the agencies.
So, look, we have to really dig into this
to make sure
that our elections are secure.
We worked with Homeland Security
on the domestic side,
and we spent
hundreds of millions of dollars.
We've sent people out
to work with governors.
We wanted to make sure
we had all the implements in place
to guarantee that every person's vote
was legitimate.
If we lose confidence
from the American people
in terms of their vote, doesn't matter.
Our democracy will decline
and maybe it will
be a democracy.
And we have to have integrity of that.
So we have to put in place
all the systems that if there's a glitch,
there was a problem,
let's go after it.
We said we must have paper backup,
we must have audits.
We're welcome audits.
If something goes wrong,
a Republican can stand here
and a Democrat can stand here
and they can watch the count
and see what happened.
If there was a fraud,
and the other person won, we accept that.
But as we know, in 2020,
there were what, 65,000 court cases,
no one to provide any proof whatsoever.
We had audits
many times, some states, three times.
Some states
people said, oh, if they hire them,
they'll surely be on our side.
Oops, no, we didn't find it.
So we've done everything
we can to put in place
the process to make sure that the people
who are voting
no, that their vote counts and there's no
no reason
why this person should
not win that election.