Counting nodes in a trie
If you don't have any degree-1 nodes in your trie (which is a tree) than you have more leaves than interior nodes. So in this case you have $I\le n $.

It depends a bit how you define the trie whether you can have many interior degree-1 nodes. If you study a compressed trie the all the path of degree-1 nodes are merges to an edge, so you are done. For an uncompressed trie, I am afraid, you can have many degree-1 nodes. Say you have one letter $a_i$ that is very common and has a high probability of $1-\varepsilon$ and $\varepsilon\in \Omega(1/n^2)$. Then your trie contains many long degree-1 paths with high probability. In this case the you can have more than $O(n)$ interior nodes. Please do the computations by yourself (you might choose a smaller $\varepsilon$ if you like).