FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

The VICE Guide to Right Now

Trump Is Expected to Name Dan Coats as Director of National Intelligence

Pending congressional approval, Coats would oversee 16 different intelligence agencies and serve as an advisor to the president on matters of national security and counterterrorism.
Dan Coats at Trump Tower on November 30, 2016. Photo by Albin Lohr-Jones/Pool via Bloomberg

President-elect Donald Trump will likely name former Indiana senator Dan Coats as the director of national intelligence Thursday, the New York Times reports.

Coats, a Republican, began his political career in the House of Representatives in 1981, and later moved on to serve as a state senator for Indiana in 1989 for ten years, and then again in 2011. Between his two stints in the Senate, Coats was the US ambassador to Germany under George W. Bush until 2005.

Coats doesn't have much experience working within the intelligence community, but he did sit on the Senate Intelligence Committee before retiring in 2015. He met with Trump on November 30 to reportedly offer advice to the president-elect.

"I was invited here just to sit down and discuss a number of issues that the president would be facing, and I gave him some of my years of experience in terms of what I thought they would be dealing with and made some suggestions," Coats told reporters after the meeting.

As the director of national intelligence, Coats will oversee 16 different intelligence agencies and serve as an advisor to the president on matters of national security and counterterrorism. Pending congressional approval, Coats will be the head of the US intelligence community, which Trump was reportedly planning on restructuring, according to the Wall Street Journal, though Trump's camp claims otherwise.