The acting Director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats, took the opportunity to throw shade at President Donald Trump while speaking at the Aspen Security Forum on Thursday. The annual event at a ski resort in Colorado has served for several years as a venue for leading neoconservatives, uber-hawks, and  Washington D.C based defense contractors to coordinate their political activities, recently becoming an opportunity for the elite bureaucrat class to fume collectively in hatred against the America First vision of foreign policy articulated by President Trump. However, it comes as a surprise to many to see an acting high-level U.S national security official speak publicly against the foreign policy of peaceful and principled realism set forth by the President he is nominally bound to serve as Commander-in-Chief.

Speaking to MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell, Director Coats justified an earlier statement of opposition he had released in response to the President’s press conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, stating that he “needed to correct the record,” and that he “wished [Trump] had made a different statement.” Coats went on to express a sense of bewilderment upon learning that Trump had invited President Putin to the White House for further bilateral negotiations, initially asking Mitchell to repeat herself before responding with “okay… That’s going to be special,” speaking in reference to the planned White House visit.

Coats even floated the possibility of resignation from his office in his discussion with the MSNBC talk show host, answering a question about whether of not he had even considered resigning from his position as a form of protest against the sitting President’s national security policies by saying it was “a place I don’t really go to, publicly.” It’s uncertain if the President deserves intelligence personnel who are able to fully devote their efforts to apolitical public service without the possibility of resigning to advance an alternate political agenda, from the perspective of the acting U.S intelligence chief.

Other deep-state linked political figures, such as Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, and the former pundit-extraordinaire and now full-time Twitter crybaby Bill Kristol, were in attendance at the four-day exclusive conference, with tickets for attendance ranging from $1,500 to $2,000.