“We all knew Coats’ departure was coming because he had clashed with the president on several issues. What was weird was the president’s forcefulness in not wanting Sue Gordon to take over as acting director,” said Katrina Mulligan, a former official who worked in the ODNI, the national security council, and the justice department.
“I was hearing at the time that Sue was getting actively excluded from things by the president that she would ordinarily have taken part in, and she was being made to feel uncomfortable,” said Mulligan, now managing director for national security and international policy at the Center for American Progress.
“And then the president tried to install someone who was clearly unqualified,” she added. “Now the timeline of the whistleblower in the White House raises a lot of questions about the Sue Gordon piece of this.”
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