In the weeks following Comey’s March 20, 2017 testimony, the President repeatedly asked intelligence community officials to push back publicly on any suggestion that the President had a connection to the Russian election- interference effort. On March 22, 2017, the President asked Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats and CIA Director Michael Pompeo to stay behind in the Oval 334 Office after a Presidential Daily Briefing. According to Coats, the President asked them whether they could say publicly that no link existed between him 335 and Russia. Coats responded that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has nothing to do with investigations and it was not his role 336 to make a public statement on the Russia investigation. Pompeo had no recollection of being asked to stay behind after the March 22 briefing, but he recalled that the President regularly urged officials to get the word out that he 337 had not done anything wrong related to Russia. Coats told this Office that the President never asked him to speak to Comey 338 about the FBI investigation. Some ODNI staffers, however, had a different recollection of how Coats described the meeting immediately after it occurred. According to senior ODNI official Michael Dempsey, Coats said after the meeting that the President had brought up the Russia investigation and asked him to contact Comey to see if there was a way to get past the investigation, get 339 it over with, end it, or words to that effect. Dempsey said that Coats described the President’s comments as falling “somewhere between musing about hating the investigation” and wanting Coats to “do something to stop 340 it.” Dempsey said Coats made it clear that he would not get involved with an 341 ongoing FBI investigation. Edward Gistaro, another ODNI official, recalled that right after Coat’s meeting with the President, on the walk from the Oval Office back to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, Coats said that the President had kept him behind to ask him what he could do to “help with the 342 investigation.” Another ODNI staffer who had been waiting for Coats outside the Oval Office talked to Gistaro a few minutes later and recalled Gistaro reporting that Coats was upset because the President had asked him to contact 343 Comey to convince him there was nothing to the Russia investigation. On Saturday, March 25, 2017, three days after the meeting in the Oval