Tobin Harshaw, Columnist

Former CIA Boss Tells All on Trump, Russians and Making Magic

A Q&A with CIA legend John McLaughlin raises the question: Why would anybody work for this president?

July 25, 2018 at 5:00 PM UTC

Tobin Harshaw is a Bloomberg Opinion senior editor and columnist on national security and military affairs. Previously, he was deputy editor at the op-ed page of the New York Times and the newspaper’s letters editor.

Would magic work against Trump?
Photographer: Prakash Singh/AFP/Getty Images

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Donald Trump’s invitation last week of Vladimir Putin to the White House caught a lot of people by surprise. Nobody more so, it seems, than his own director of national intelligence, Dan Coats.

During an onstage interview at the Aspen Security Forum hours after Trump tweeted the announcement, Andrea Mitchell of NBC News asked Coats about it. After a brief deer-in-the-headlights moment, he responded with, “That’ll be special.” He also admitted that he had no clue what Trump and Putin had discussed behind closed doors in Helsinki days earlier.