The country's intelligence chief was on the verge of resigning at the end of last year but was talked out of it by VP Pence, according to current and former senior administration officials.
Other times Coats has taken steps that appeared designed to appease Trump. Early last year, for instance, he carried out Trump's directive to develop new procedures for the so-calledof the names of U.S. citizens who indirectly turn up in intelligence gathering. Trump and some of his leading Republican allies in Congress had attacked the Obama administration's use of unmasking, which is common in any administration, as improper and evidence of bias against Trump officials.
Pence has talked Coats through his frustrations with Trump by"encouraging him to continue the work he's doing and reiterating that he has the support of the White House," according to one White House official. The vice president's message to Coats has been to"hold the line, and to keep doing the work he's doing," the official said.
In his new role, Coats was responsible for walking a president he hardly knew through his daily intelligence briefing. He quickly found his boss had a short attention span for the information he was providing, current and former administration officials said. Coats struggled with how to respond when Trump veered off on unrelated tangents or bluntly disagreed with the intelligence he presented — as he often did, the current and former senior administration officials said.
Trump believed it was Coats's responsibility to come up with conclusive proof he had been wiretapped, make it public and criticize the alleged eavesdropping, officials said. He repeatedly demanded that Coats get the word out that the U.S. intelligence community was biased against him, officials said.
Tensions between Trump and Coats were manageable as long as the dynamic played out behind closed doors, officials said.
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