Dan Coats: From Dan Quayle's Staffer to Contradicting Trump on Russia

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Daniel Ray Coats was born in 1943 in Jackson, Michigan, served in the Army Corps of Engineers from 1966 to 1968 and earned a law degree from Indiana University. A Chicago Cubs fan who took his bride to a game on their wedding day, he became a staffer for Representative Dan Quayle, won Quayle's House seat in 1980 and was appointed to Quayle's Senate seat when Quayle became vice president. In the Senate he helped write Don't Ask, Don't Tell in 1993, voted for the Brady Act and the Feinstein amendment, cosponsored the 1996 Line Item Veto Act that the Supreme Court struck down, and questioned the timing of Bill Clinton's 1998 strikes on Afghanistan and Sudan. He left in 1998, and as ambassador to Germany from 2001 pressed Gerhard Schroeder's government over Iraq while building ties with Angela Merkel.

As a lobbyist he worked for Cooper Industries, which had moved its headquarters to Bermuda, and in 2005 he shepherded Harriet Miers's failed Supreme Court nomination. He returned to the Senate in 2010 after Evan Bayh retired, joined the Intelligence Committee, and pushed sanctions after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, prompting Russia to ban him from the country. Confirmed 85 to 12 as Director of National Intelligence in 2017, he issued a statement the day after the July 2018 Helsinki summit reaffirming that Russia interfered in the 2016 election. His 2019 Worldwide Threat Assessment listed climate change as a security threat. In July 2019 President Trump announced he would step down and nominated John Ratcliffe.

• He won the 2010 general election by 15 points.
• He opposed the 2015 Iran nuclear deal and cosponsored the Taylor Force Act.
• In 2013 he voted against expanded background checks.
• He publicly denied writing the anonymous 2018 New York Times resistance op-ed, later revealed to be the work of Miles Taylor.
• He appointed Shelby Pierson as the intelligence community's first election security czar.