ratcliffe, john Rep DNI
new 616
11 24 trump trans CIA pjt 2025 afpi wiles?
SEE EXTRA-JUDICIAL KILLING TARGETTNG VENEZ
SEE FAIL DEI
pension plan post trump insurr?
tried to suppress info on active measures 2020?!
wow, aha score zinger to trump opponent is qualification for high office, no matter lack of tempErment or expertise.
As for Brennan, a source briefed on the matter said CIA Director John Ratcliffe had made a criminal referral of Brennan to the Justice Department. Exactly what prompted the Comey investigation is unclear.
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Trump's own spy chief just secretly delivered a warning to Putin :report
AN 10 26
Trump's CIA director traveled to Moscow to assess the Russia-Ukraine war, and his verdict came with a warning to Vladimir Putin.
Trump sent the CIA director, John Ratcliffe, in August to meet Russian security officials, The Atlantic reported Friday, citing sources familiar with the talks.
Ratcliffe presented his conclusion that neither side is winning the war, noting that Russian forces had failed to make any meaningful gains, but Ukraine had also failed at pushing them out of occupied territory.
American and Russian spies communicated through an intelligence back channel, called "the channel," to speak privately.
While Ratcliffe did not meet Putin personally, his intelligence chiefs documented his message for the Russian president.
U.S. officials believe that Putin is being misled by his advisers, and they hope the information would get him to negotiate with Ukraine to end the war.
Ratcliffe later spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky about the Moscow visit while they refueled their planes in Ireland in September, according to the report.
This comes as Trump’s public statements seem to contradict his own spy chief's conclusion about the conflict.
Trump, who has never had a good relationship with the Ukrainian president, recently became a more vocal critic, accusing him of refusing to make a peace deal and saying he is "more difficult to deal with than Putin."
Trump also attacked Ukraine's renewed strikes on Russian oil refineries, calling them "a disgrace" and blaming them for the rising cost of fuel globally, while most experts believe the Iran war is mostly responsible for the price hike.
Trump also insisted that Ukraine could choose other targets in direct contradiction to Zelensky’s repeated warnings that Russia is using their fuel to attack Ukraine.
The International Energy Agency report suggests Ukraine has been successful in its campaign. Per the report, Russian refinery throughput fell to its lowest level in more than 20 years in June, roughly 30% below the previous year.
Its analysis also found that Ukrainian strikes hit a Russian refinery about once every three days during the first eight months of 2026. Russian gasoline production fell by 20% and diesel production had fallen by about 30%, which led to export restrictions to preserve supply.
Meanwhile, The Atlantic reported that the CIA gives Ukraine intelligence to help them identify and hit russian energy targets. A Baltic intelligence officer said the operations are "much more aggressive" than under Biden.
After Trump criticized Zelensky, Ukraine's defenses faced restrictions on Starlink satellite services, which disrupted its ability to operate defensive drones.
Zelensky has repeatedly said Ukraine is willing to end the war, but Russia has no plans to stop.
Ratcliffe's Moscow mission seemingly contradicts Trump’s statements about Ukraine and Russia, as his relationship with Putin sparks anger across both sides of the political aisle.
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omfg
an 10 26
One of the forces behind President Donald Trump’s Iran paranoia was the fear that a single nuclear blast miles above America could knock out the power grid and plunge the country into darkness.
*The New York Times* reported on Wednesday that the political prominence of beliefs that Iran could knock out the U.S. with nothing more than an electromagnetic pulse (EMP).
Ironically, the report began by mentioning that during Trump's first term, he "signed an executive order directing federal agencies to defend the United States against an unusual type of nuclear strike that his advisers warned could shatter the power grid, wipe out critical infrastructure and lead to a national collapse."
The problem is that it's incredibly unlikely.
The report explains that the overwhelming scientific consensus is that Iran managing an EMP attack would be extraordinarily difficult to carry out. An EMP is a powerful burst of energy that is created when a nuclear weapon is detonated high in the atmosphere. In a normal nuclear strike an EMP likely wouldn't kill people the way an actual blast would. The real problem is that it would disable electricity, communications, transportation, banking, water systems and other U.S. infrastructure. In an era run by technology, it would collapse the U.S.
In 2019, President Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to strengthen U.S. resilience to EMPs after a New York "dairy entrepreneur" sounded the alarm that even a small nuke from Iran could trigger an EMP and collapse the U.S. Henry Schwartz has been on a mission to incite panic among top Republican officials and advisers in the U.S.
That's when conservatives like Frank Gaffney, Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee, John Bolton, Pete Hegseth, John Ratcliffe and JD Vance began panicking and promoting the warnings and advocating for military action against Iran’s nuclear program.
According to the experts who spoke with the Times, the freakout is being dramatically overstated.
To have a successful high-altitude EMP attack, Iran would likely need a hydrogen bomb, not a basic atomic weapon. They would also need the exact altitude, orientation, "precise alignment of its gamma rays" and unpredictable space-weather conditions.
According to Stephen M. Younger, a former Los Alamos physicist, even advanced nuclear states would struggle with this and the odds that it could take down the U.S. are worse than even a coin flip.
"In the vacuum of space, however, the gamma rays create no shock waves or mushroom cloud. Instead, they strike the planet’s upper atmosphere, producing a chain reaction that creates something akin to a super-strong radio transmitter," said the report. "The gamma rays hit air molecules and knock out electrons that spin around the Earth’s geomagnetic field lines, creating waves of electromagnetic energy so powerful they can fry circuits thousands of miles away."
Experts have certainly kept an eye on it, but it isn't as likely as Mr. Schwartz seems to believe. Still, his close relationship with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth suggests a Schwartz believer is at the top.
The report closes by making it clear that while nuclear proliferation should always be a concern and grid security is important, an Iranian EMP attack is not a credible near-term existential threat. Schwartz's EMP movement may be politically influential, but among the scientific community, reality reigns. It turns Schwartz's exaggerated campaign into a confrontation with Iran.
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digby an 10 25
President Donald Trump's former "tormenter" turned Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, has become a "MAGA powerhouse," driving an "illegal war on Venezuela," writes Salon's Heather Digby Parton.
Digby Parton recalls Rubio's "most-cringe prime time performances" when he gave the rebuttal to President Barack Obama's 2013 State of the Union speech and
, "cementing his reputation as the thirstiest man in the U.S. Senate."
What was viewed by many as the end of Rubio's career has long been forgotten, or at least ignored, and, Digby Parton writes, "it’s a testament to his limitless ambition that he came back from that and is now one of the most powerful people in the world."
The former Florida senator, she writes, "showed early on an aptitude for sensing which way the wind was blowing," and "over the years he held both moderate and conservative positions on most issues."
Rubio, she says, initially "rejected the scientific consensus on climate change and then, a few years later, decided it was true." He was also "once one of the Republican Party’s most vocal advocates for comprehensive immigration reform and even sponsored the DREAM Act," she writes.
"Now he energetically supports Donald Trump on the most draconian deportation program in American history," she writes, adding that "he broke with the GOP on more than one occasion when it came to budget battles, at times striking a pose as populist defender of the little guy, but overall he was a standard-issue right-wing conservative on taxes and spending."
Rubio's focus, she says, has always been national security and foreign policy as an "unreconstructed hawk," but has also taken a hard-line stance against human rights violations in China, Turkey and Venezeula.
Rubio also served as co-chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence with Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), with whom he led a three-year investigation that found clear evidence of Russian interference on Trump’s behalf in the 2016 election, exactly as Robert Mueller’s investigation had established, Digby Parton notes.
Rubio even once taunted Trump about his "small hands," something that Digby Parton says "for a man who carries around grudges like precious offspring, it’s odd that Trump has apparently decided to overlook all that, but Rubio worked hard to abase himself and get into the inner circle."
And while the political establishment and many Democrats were "relieved" when Trump chose Rubio as Secretary of State, thinking he would "keep Trump foreign policy from going off the rails," Digby Parton writes, "little did they know that Rubio had happily made a deal with the devil and now seems to relish the idea of ripping up the world order in Trump’s image."
"They certainly couldn’t have anticipated how eagerly Rubio would join in thedeportationcrusade by targeting foreign students for visa violations, as well as for unauthorized opinions about Israel and Charlie Kirk," she writes.
Among Rubio's other turns include his endorsement of the Trump administration's shutdown of medical and food programs of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), of which Rubio had always been supportive.
"It came a something of a shock," she writes, adding "he even agreed to betray informants under U.S. protection to Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele in exchange for an agreement to lock up purported Venezuelan gang members in El Salvador’s gruesome gulag."
When Russia first invaded Ukraine, Rubio condemned President Vladimir Putin's aggression, but then quickly "changed his tune," "voting against military aid early on and adopting the Trump line that a negotiated settlement was the only way out."
Rubio's stance on Venezuela, she says, comes from his background as a member of "the anti-Castro Cuban-American community of South Florida."
"Rubio has a strong strain of anti-left ideology which has made him especially obsessed with Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s socialist authoritarian president," Digby Parton says.
According to recent reports in the *Wall Street Journal*, "the extrajudicial killings, CIA covert actions and pending war plans against Venezuela are all being driven by Rubio," she writes. "Rubio and deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller have carried the day with a full-fledged plan to pressure and perhaps depose the Venezuelan leader."
Rubio's future ambitions, she says, is the driving force in all of his actions.
"Marco Rubio almost certainly intends to run for president in 2028 and sees his service in that cause as the best way to fulfill his own agenda and expand both his power and his political profile," she says, adding "He’s a fully paid-up MAGA fanatic now, and no one should think otherwise."
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YIKES
an 7 25
The Guardian reports even dedicated CIA critic Tim Weiner is sounding the alarm on the damage President Donald Trump is doing the agency.
Weiner — who wrote the CIA political take-down ‘Legacy of Ashes’ about decades of CIA mistakes and bad behavior — compares Trump’s second administration to watching the U.S. stand with Russia, Iran and North Korea by voting against a UN resolution condemning the invasion of Ukraine.
“You come to the realization, if you hadn’t already: ‘My God, the president of the United States has gone over to the other side. He has joined the authoritarian axis,’” Weiner said.
READ MORE: Stick a fork in him: Trump finally faces the threat of retribution—from MAGA
A chapter of Weiner’s new book "The Mission" addresses how the CIA was blindsided by Russia’s influence operation on behalf of Trump’s 2016 campaign. This was when Russian intelligence began releasing hacked Democratic National Committee emails, dealing a devastating blow to Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
“The Russians stole our f—————— election. How do we make sure this never happens again?” Weiner recalls CIA head Tom Rakusan demanding of his staff.
Following two impeachments, an insurrection and a second election, Trump is back in the White House and bent on revenge against the CIA. He’s also hired, according to Weiner, “a coterie of dangerously incompetent and servile acolytes to the highest positions of national security”.
“What keeps me up at night,” he told The Guardian, “is the fact that Trump has put the instruments of American national security in the hands of crackpots and fools, and that their incompetence and ideological blinkers will blind them to a coming attack. If the United States gets hit again under Trump, he will destroy what is left of our democracy.”
READ MORE:'This is his king complex': Republicans split as Trump threatens to 'takeover' a 'pigsty'
Weiner describes new CIA director, John Ratcliffe — a former personal injury attorney — as “a spineless person who will do whatever Trump tells him to do.”
Ratcliffe immediately fired hundreds of recently hired staffers and then sent their names to Elon Musk in an unclassified email that Weiner said was probably intercepted by the Russians and Chinese, who are now presumably working to recruit them as spies.
“All they need to do is to find people who are either deeply resentful or who might have a financial or a drug problem to be exploited,” Weiner said.
Trump’s anti-diversity crusade was another foolish mistake because “if you want to spy in a nation like Somalia or Pakistan or China, it might be wise to have a workforce that is not made up exclusively of white guys, and who speak languages other than English,” Weiner said. “Diversity was one of the CIA’s few superpowers, and the mindless abolition of the effort to diversify the CIA’s officers and analysts was one of the most stupid self-inflicted wounds that Radcliffe could have delivered.”
READ MORE:'Blatantly political': Outrage grows as Americans receive misleading email from Trump admin
Sadly, Weiner says no “Robert Mueller” or “Barack Obama” is going to save the nation. What that takes is a massive upheaval from Americans.
“[T]he other day, several million Americans marched in the street to protest the Mad King. And just as only we can defeat ourselves, I think only we can save ourselves,” Weiner said.
Read the full Guardian report at this link.
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nbc?
:{July 9, 2025
By Ken Dilanian, Ryan J. Reilly and Dan De Luce
The Trump administration has put two repeated targets of President Donald Trump under criminal investigation, although details of what exactly they are being investigated for or how far the Justice Department intends on taking the probes are unclear.
The two targets are former CIA Director John Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey, whom Trump fired in his first term, according to a statement that a Justice Department spokesperson provided to reporters.
The statement followed a Fox News article on Tuesday evening reporting on the existence of the investigations. After referring to Comey and Brennan, the spokesperson said the Justice Department does "not comment on ongoing investigations.”
A lawyer for Comey had no comment. Brennan, who is a paid contributor to NBC News and MSNBC, said he has not been contacted by the Justice Department or the CIA about the reported investigation. The FBI declined to comment.
The Fox News article was published as both FBI Director Kash Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi are facing significant blowback from conservative media and influencers over their handling of the Jeffrey Epstein investigation and material related to it. This week, the Justice Department and the FBI put out a memo restating what prior investigations had already found: that Epstein, a convicted sex offender and financier, killed himself in his jail cell in 2019 and that there was no incriminating evidence against uncharged third parties.
Patel, before joining the government, engaged with conspiracy theories about Epstein, while a statement from Bondi that an Epstein "client list" was sitting on her desk fueled more speculation on the right. Bondi later said she was speaking about documents related to Epstein, not an actual list.
U.S. newsVirginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin says his family was rescued in Texas floods
As for Brennan, a source briefed on the matter said CIA Director John Ratcliffe had made a criminal referral of Brennan to the Justice Department. Exactly what prompted the Comey investigation is unclear.
Ratcliffe last week released an internal CIA review that criticized Brennan’s handling of a 2017 intelligence assessment concluding that Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted to help Trump defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.
Any conduct that took place during that campaign or even in most of Trump’s first term is now outside the typical five-year statute of limitations for federal crimes. The Fox News article mentions testimony that Brennan gave to the House Judiciary Committee in May 2023 about the so-called Steele Dossier that was an issue during the 2016 campaign. It cites no specific conduct from Comey during the past five years.
A special counsel appointed by then-Attorney General William Barr spent years investigating how the 2017 intelligence assessment was put together, requiring many CIA officials to hire lawyers. That special counsel, John Durham, also used a grand jury to scrutinize the actions of Brennan, Comey and many who worked for them over how the FBI and CIA handled investigations into Russia’s effort to interfere in the 2016 election. But Durham did not charge the two former leaders or accuse them of wrongdoing. His sole charge against a public official came against a low-level FBI lawyer who had lied on a warrant application.
The Trump administration has been taking action against people involved in investigations of the president and his supporters. The Justice Department has a "Weaponization Working Group" that is examining those investigations, and many who worked on them and were still in the department have been fired. And on his first day in office, Trump pardoned his supporters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
ED FUCKING MARTIN JARED WISE EX FBI
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demoted? no cia
an 11 24
As a candidate, Donald Trump insisted he knew nothing about the far-right Heritage Foundation's authoritarian Project 2025 playbook. But as president-elect, Trump is appointing some of its authors to powerful positions in his Cabinet.
On Friday, Trump confirmed previous reports that he would be appointing Russell Vought – president of the Center for Renewing America (CRA) — to be his next director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Vought served in that role in Trump's first administration, and is likely to bring back Trump's controversial "Schedule F" executive order that would make it easier for a president to fire tens of thousands of federal civil service workers and replace them with political loyalists.
After leaving the Trump White House, Vought founded the CRA, which was one of the key partner organizations backing Project 2025. In August, two undercover journalists got Vought to admit in a hidden camera interview that Trump's rhetoric distancing himself from Project 2025 was just for show, and that he has secretly "blessed it" and was "very supportive" of the plan.
READ MORE:Trump's plan to 'aggressively' reshape government would create 'army of suck-ups': report
As Agence France-Presse journalist Bill McCarthy noted in a Friday tweet, Vought is just the latest Project 2025 contributor to join the Trump Cabinet. Brendan Carr, who Trump nominated to chair the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) authored the section of Project 2025 that specifically dealt with the FCC.
Other Project 2025 contributors taking key roles in the Trump administration include Michigan Republican Party chair Pete Hoekstra — who was tapped to be the next U.S. Ambassador to Canada — and former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, who the president-elect has since nominated to be the next director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Tom Homan, who will be Trump's new border czar, is also listed as a contributor to Project 2025.
Homan's contributions were likely concentrated among Project 2025's recommendations for reforming the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). That section, which was chiefly written by former Trump DHS official Ken Cuccinelli, called for rapidly expanding the DHS' staff and consolidating various border enforcement agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to be under one umbrella. At a far-right conference in Washington, D.C. earlier this summer, Homan — who was Trump's ICE chief in his first administration — promised that if he were given a position within the Trump administration, he would assemble "the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen."
“They ain’t seen s— yet. Wait until 2025," Homan said at the National Conservatism conference.
READ MORE:'He is on our side': Org behind Project 2025 boasts repeatedly about close ties to Trump
During the 2024 election cycle, Vice President Kamala Harris repeatedly sought to associate Project 2025 with Trump, causing the Republican nominee to repeatedly distance himself from it on the campaign stump due to the document's overwhelming unpopularity. Notably, Trump transition co-chairman Howard Lutnick — who Trump selected to head the U.S. Department of Commerce — promised to blacklist anyone linked to Project 2025 from serving in his second administration, calling the Heritage Foundation and its sweeping policy document "radioactive."
Trump keeping Project 2025 at arms' length didn't pass muster, however, with CNN finding that more than 140 of Trump's former advisors and staffers helped assemble the document. Heritage itself has also heavily promoted its close relationship with Trump on its website and in its fundraising materials, pointing out that in his first year as president he implemented roughly two-thirds of their policy recommendations.
"President Trump addressed a group of Heritage members. He confirmed, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he is on our side," a 2017 email from Heritage read.
In June, People magazine published a comprehensive report delving into Project 2025, calling it a "far-right, Christian nationalist vision for America that would corrode the separation of church and state, replace nonpartisan government employees with Trump loyalists and bolster the president's authority over independent agencies."
READ MORE:'Nearly all' voters know about Project 2025 and majority have negative view of it: report
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an 11 23
the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals unsealed documents containing U.S. Representative Scott Perry's (R-PA) interactions and efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, Politico reports.
Per Politico, Perry's conversations with former U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) official Jeffrey Clark — who was indicted alongside former President Donald Trump and 17 others the ongoing Georgia election case — "are perhaps the most revealing."
During one conversation, the news outlet reports, "Perry told Clark that Trump was upset with Clark for using the Justice Department to defend [ex-Vice President Mike] Pence against a lawsuit brought by another House member, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas)."
The Texas lawmaker "was seeking a court ruling declaring that Pence had the power to unilaterally reject Biden's electoral votes, but DOJ’s civil division — then under Clark’s leadership — stepped in to defend Pence against the suit, which failed," the report notes.
The Pennsylvania GOP leader texted Clark on December 30, 2020, "POTUS seems very happy with your response. I read it just as you dictated," to which the former DOJ official replied, "I'm praying. This makes me quite nervous. And wonder if I'm worthy or ready."
Perry said, "You are the man. I have confirmed it. God does what he does for a reason."
Politico listed the "extraordinary web of communications between Perry, who is now the chair of the House Freedom Caucus, and key figures in Trump's orbit," including:
A Dec. 12, 2020, text exchange with Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel discussing efforts to challenge Joe Biden’s victory in the election.*}:
A series of exchanges between Perry and a former DOJ colleague, Robert Gasaway, between Dec. 30, 2020, and Jan. 5, 2021, in which Perry embraced a plan to have then-Vice President Mike Pence “admit testimony” prior to the counting of electoral votes on Jan. 6, 2021. Perry agreed to “sell[] the idea” with a call to Trump, Pence and Trump adviser John Eastman, but Perry later alerted Gasaway that Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short, “will not allow access.”
A description of numerous exchanges between Perry and top Trump administration officials, including Clark, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, senior adviser Eric Herschmann and Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, a former House colleague of Perry.}:
*Politico's full report ishere.
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mma 4 23
JOHN RATCLIFFE (FORMER DIRECTOR OF NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE): Well, Maria, I mean, the point is this is election interference. We don't know how – no one really knows how this is going to play out. We just know that it is going to be a factor. We have crossed the Rubicon from people saying, you know, on the left, President Trump should be indicted to the discussion is going to be President Trump was indicted. And however long this case takes, and very clearly, it's not going to play out throughout the court system in less than the year that it's going to take to, you know, to, you know, reach a Republican nominee.
And so this action, this political persecution is going to influence our politics every single day for the next year until a Republican nominee is chosen, and that is, by definition, election interference. This is wholly inappropriate, you know, a complete perversion of our political system, and I think people need to, hopefully, understand and see what's going on here through these imposter D.A.s like Alvin Bragg. But this is coast to coast, you know? This is Kim Foxx in Chicago, this is George Gascon in California, this is George Soros funding all of these people where we've put socialists in charge of the American judicial system. We've put people who don't understand or appreciate orstand up for American values in charge of our legal system to distort it intentionally and deliberately and, unfortunately, Donald Trump is the first but won't be the last person to be persecuted under that system.
MARIA BARTIROMO (FOX NEWS HOST): Well, this is a really good point that you're making because George Soros makes no apology for it. In fact, he wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal just a couple of weeks ago. You're talking about the $40 million that he has donated to get these D.A.s in place. He says I've done it transparently. I've no intention of stopping. The funds I provide enable sensible, reform-minded candidates to receive a hearing from the public. Judging by the results, the public likes what it's hearing. I'm not sure which public he's talking to becausethese D.A.s are using bail reform to put criminals back on the streetexcept if it's Donald Trump.
RATCLIFFE: Maria, they're not D.A.s, they're imposter D.A.s. These are political plants. These are people who are only being supported with, you know, $40 million – in the case of Alvin Bragg a million dollars from George Soros – only because of a promise that you're in this position, you will pursue political prosecution of our opponents, those on the right. And that is, again, happening coast to coast, and that's really what's at stake. This should be a clarion call to Americans who otherwise don't tune in to politics ordon't think that it affects them. It absolutely has, and the bedrock principles of our justice system are clearly under assault where, again, we have socialists who are anathema to, you know, American values in charge largely of our judicial system, you know, through these state D.A.s and prosecutors.
fbi 250K$ reward for KK?
https://www.alternet.org/2021/03/trump-russia-campaign/
max Boot, a Russian-American author and historian and a fellow on the Council on Foreign Relations,says the U.S. Intel Community's just-released report on Russia's attack on the 2020 presidential election is "evidence of cooperation" – at least – between the Trump campaign and Moscow.
The report details that **Russian President Vladimir Putin** once again interfered in the election, again to help President Donald Trump, and to hurt now-President Joe Biden.
"I would say this is certainly evidence," Boot says, "it may be evidence of collusion, but it's definitely evidence of cooperation and congruence between the Russians and the Trump campaign."
Boot praised the Biden administration for authorizing the release of the report, which he says Americans would not have seen under the Trump administration, while singling out Acting Trump DNI and DNI Rick Grinnell and John Ratcliffe, who "consistently tried to minimize and downplay Russian election interference."
Importantly, Boot notes the report shows "just how closely the Russian messaging during the election echoed the messaging of the Trump campaign of Fox News and this kind of whole right wing media industrial complex."
"It's fascinating to see the extent to which the Russians were pushing the same messages about alleged Biden corruption, about his supposedly corrupt son, about you can't trust mail-in ballots, that the Democratic Party is trying to interfere with the election. These were the things that Trump was saying, but these were also the things that the Russians were saying, and in fact, the report highlights the close ties between Russian agents of influence like Andrii Derkach from Ukraine. Ukraine and Rudy Giuliani the president's lawyer, Konstantin Kilimnik is another one, who is a former business partner of Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign manager, so these ties are a copious and disturbing and to use a word we haven't heard in a few years, I would say this is certainly evidence. If not, it may be evidence of collusion, but it's definitely evidence of cooperation and and congruence between the Russians and the Trump campaign."
Watch...
https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/russia-intelligence-trump/
DC rept
Lost in the news on the day of Trump's Insurrection was a devastating new watchdog report to Congress on the politicizing and distorting of intelligence during Donald Trump's time in office.
The analytic ombudsman, career intelligence community veteran Barry A. Zulauf, determined that under Trump national intelligence reports had become highly politicized. Important findings were suppressed to appease Trump's refusal to acknowledge Russian interference in American elections.
Zulauf's unclassified report paints a frightening picture of just how much the Trump administration skewed intelligence to suppress knowledge of interference by Russia in our 2020 elections.
From March 2020, in the critical months leading up to the elections, Zulauf "identified a long story arc of—at the very least—perceived politicization of intelligence."
Zulauf works in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), a Cabinet-level position created after the 9/11 terrorist attacks to oversee all U.S. intelligence operations. Zulauf's job within the ODNI was created by Congress to assist analysts throughout the intelligence community with complaints and concerns about politicization, biased reporting or lack of objectivity in intelligence analysis.
This is the first of a two-part series. Coming in Part 2: The intelligence community under Trump was not alone in diverting focus from Russian interference.
Zulauf determined that Trump's ODNI took "willful actions that… had the effect of politicizing intelligence, hindering objective analysis or injecting bias into the intelligence process."
While Zulauf tried to avoid specifically naming individuals responsible for much of the political heavy-handed rewriting, he repeatedly calls out actions taken by two recent Trump appointees, neither of whom had any chops as intelligence experts.
One is former an acting director, Richard Grenell. He had been a Fox News commentator and Trump-appointed ambassador to Germany, and took over the ODNI in February 2020 then relinquished the post the following May.
The second was the Texas congressman Trump appointed to replace Grenell, John Ratcliffe, best known as a fervent defender of the ex-president in his first impeachment.
In one particularly egregious example, Zulauf wrote, Ratcliffe insisted on highlighting Chinese election interference while downplaying Russian efforts.
"Ratcliffe just disagreed with the established analytic line on China, insisting 'we are missing' China's influence in the US and that Chinese actions ARE intended to affect the election," Zulauf wrote. "Ultimately the DNI insisted on putting material on China in…. As a result, the final published [assessment], analysts felt, was an outrageous misrepresentation of their analysis."
The intelligence community has procedures to make sure assessments are based on sound judgment by seasoned analysts, not rogue points of view especially when they are not supported by facts.
The Senate Intelligence Committee requested the ombudsman review possible politicization of intelligence. Interestingly, Zulauf notes, he had his own review under way when the Senate Intelligence Committee request arrived. The ombudsman started his own investigation after he was approached by ombudsmen at three other agencies within the intelligence community. They acted because intelligence agency professionals and managers perceived problems and were getting internal complaints about the politicization of intelligence.
Helsinki Betrayal
The findings come 29 months after Trump declared in Helsinki, standing next to Vladimir Putin, that he trusted the Russian leader, but not the American intelligence services.
By putting his trust in Putin, a former KGB colonel, saying that he took him at his word when he denied interfering in the 2016 presidential election, Trump reiterated his denunciations of American intelligence services.
Trump refused on most days to sit for his intelligence briefing, a closely guarded summary of worldwide threats to America and its allies. The report is prepared by experienced analysts based on reports from 17 American intelligence agencies, which feed material to Central Intelligence Agency for consideration.
The Presidential Daily Brief is tailored to each sitting president's style. Trump's brief was reduced to simplistic points, often illustrated with graphics. Russian actions against the United States were often left out or described obliquely to avoid provoking Trump.
Trump would have found even simplified daily briefings difficult to grasp given his ignorance about geopolitical affairs and history. For example, he once asked aides if Finland was part of Russia. He met with the Baltic presidents and confused their countries with the Balkans.
Mueller's Warning
While Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III was barred from investigating Trump's conduct as a counterintelligence matter, his office did look into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
On July 24, 2019, Mueller told the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees that Russia would continue interfering in our elections. "It was not a single attempt, [Russia's] doing it as we sit here," he testified. "And they expect to do it during the next campaign."
Yet eight months later, on March 10, 2020, in presenting the views of the intelligence community, Bill Evanina, director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center (NCSC), briefing members of Congress on election interference, said the opposite. He told lawmakers in a closed-door session for which summaries were released that there was no evidence that Russia had taken steps to help any candidate in the 2020 elections.
Analysts refer to talking points in these March statements, as well as subsequent statements in July, August and October of last year, as examples of "gross misrepresentation" of established intelligence community views.
The ombudsman's report attributes the rationale for these distortions and lies to the opposition they faced "getting their views on election interference across…in a confrontational environment."
But it does not assert that Trump directly ordered them. Several House managers noted during impeachment and Trump's better biographers have long noted, Trump gives direction the way mob bosses do, not by direct order but by relying on people to interpret a wink and a nod or even just tone of voice.
Misleading Congress...
https://www.mediamatters.org/sean-hannity/right-wing-media-embrace-john-ratcliffes-spin-alleged-iran-election-interference
no lnx vid
Right-wing media embrace John Ratcliffe's spin on alleged Iran election interference
Sen. Chuck Schumer strongly suggests he was actually told something different in a classified briefing
WRITTEN BY ERIC KLEEFELD
PUBLISHED 10/22/20
John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence under President Donald Trump, announced yesterday that not only was the Iranian government behind threatening emails recently sent to voters in the United States but also, counterintuitively, this was being done in order to “damage President Trump” in the election.
Ratcliffe had recently selectively declassified allegations against Hillary Clinton, which had previously been dismissed as Russian disinformation, in what was apparently part of the continued effect to rewrite the narrative of Russia’s interference on behalf of Trump in the 2016 election.
The threatening emails to voters were made to look like they came from the far-right street gang the Proud Boys, whom Trump endorsed at the first presidential debate. According to Ratcliffe’s logic, however, this is really a sort of reverse psychology to make Trump supporters look bad, with a singular purpose of hurting Trump in the election.
But Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) appeared Wednesday night on MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, and strongly suggested that Ratcliffe and intelligence professionals had told something different to members of Congress about the Iranian interference: that the country’s goal was to sow chaos and lack of confidence for its own sake, rather than to help or hurt specific candidates.
While it might be expected for Schumer, as a leading Democrat, to offer up such an interpretation, one argument in his favor is that The Washington Post noted Ratcliffe had “confirmed that Iran was also distributing a video ‘that implies that individuals could cast fraudulent ballots, even from overseas.’” The video in question used clips of Trump himself, making the kind of false statements that he has been using to try to discredit mail-in voting and the credibility of any potential Biden victory among his own supporters. When adding in this sort of disinformation spreading — similar to what we’ve seen from right-wing media — the overall pattern seems more like an all-of-the-above approach to fomenting uncertainty and doubt, rather than a targeted campaign against just one side.
While there are restrictions on what can be shared in such closed-door briefings, Schumer seemed to come as close as possible to declaring that what senators were told in the briefing was quite different from what Ratcliffe had told the public.
Video file
CitationFrom the October 21, 2020, edition of MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show
RACHEL MADDOW (HOST): Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe tonight did say to the public that this attack — which he attributed to Iran, although he didn’t describe the attack — was designed to damage President Trump. That sounds like —
SCHUMER: I did not —
MADDOW: — what you just said.
SCHUMER: Rachel, that is different —
MADDOW: Is that — that is not what he told you in the briefing?
SCHUMER: Well, I’m not saying what he told me in the briefing. I can tell you that from the briefing, I had the strong impression it was much rather to undermine confidence in elections, and not aimed at any particular figure but rather to undermine the very wellspring of our democracy — elections. That was my strong impression at the meeting.
I did not get the impression it was aimed at any political figure, and I’m surprised that DNI Ratcliffe said that at the — at this press conference, if he did.
But in the introductory monologue of Fox News’ Hannity, the host began with a “Fox News alert” that Iran was “attempting to intimidate voters here in the U.S. with violent threats, likely in an effort to help Joe Biden.”
Video file
CitationFrom the October 21, 2020, edition of Fox News Hannity
And on Thursday morning, Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo discussed the story with Rep. Michael Waltz (R-FL), who alleged that “Iran desperately wants President Trump out, due to its maximum pressure campaign, and they know that Biden will go back to appeasement. But, you know, we have to stay strong, continue to communicate to the public.”
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“You make a good point,” Bartiromo agreed. “Because I think Joe Biden, over the last few weeks, said that one of the first things he's going to do is return the U.S. to the Iran deal — and also the Paris climate deal. So those two things, two things that Biden has talked about. So you're right, Iran probably wants that.”
Video file
CitationFrom the October 22, 2020, edition of Fox Business’ Mornings with Maria Bartiromo
Just two weeks ago, during an interview with Trump, Bartiromo had parroted Ratcliffe’s spin from his prior declassifications — while she also helped to back up Trump’s conspiracy theories against mail-in voting.
Newsweek dutifully carried the headline “Iran Is Interfering in the U.S. Election Intimidating Voters to Hurt Trump, Intelligence Chief Says.” Similar headlines can also be found from the likes of Breitbart and The Daily Wire.
Among more mainstream outlets, The Washington Post covered the Democratic response to Ratcliffe’s allegation as a controversy in and of itself, while The New York Times included both Ratcliffe’s argument and the fact that he has “drawn criticism for embracing Mr. Trump’s political agenda from what is typically an apolitical post,” as well as an inclusion of Schumer’s response.
The Wall Street Journal, a corporate cousin of Fox News, also carried a news item that contained opinions from both Ratcliffe along with two other sources, ascribing a variety of motives to Iran: Ratcliffe’s own take that the country is seeking to harm Trump, another official saying it was motivated by seeking to undermine election confidence in general, and a third who offered up a combination of both suspected motivations.
proud boys email threat
https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/fbi-reveals-new-election-interference-by-iran-and-russia
cody f
Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe and FBI Director Christopher Wray announced on Wednesday in a last-minute press briefing that both Iran and Russia have obtained voter registration information and have "taken specific actions to influence public opinion."
In particular, Ratcliffe said that Iran has been found to have sent "spoofed emails designed to intimidate voters, incite social unrest, and damage President Trump." He seemed to be referring to an incident described in a Washington Post story published right before the conference, which said the U.S. has concluded that Iran had sent emails pretending to be from the right-wing group the Proud Boys to Democratic voters.
The Post explained:
The messages appeared to target Democrats using data from digital databases known as "voter files," some of which are commercially available. They told recipients the Proud Boys were "in possession of all your information" and instructed voters to change their party registration and cast their ballots for Trump.
It's not exactly clear the intent behind the emails. Ratcliffe, a partisan Republican put in place by President Donald Trump because he wanted a crony leading the intelligence community, seemed to give contradicting explanations. If the emails were intended to intimidate Democratic voters out of voting, that would presumably help Trump. But if the emails were meant as a false flag, designed to make Trump supporters look dangerous, then that would "damage President Trump," as Ratcliffe said. It's hard to see how Iran could have intended both outcomes. It's troubling that his explanation was this unclear, especially since he doesn't have a reputation for independence and credibility. (Ratcliffe and Wray took no questions at the briefing, refusing to give the press any opportunity to clarify their remarks.)
The other aim, though, seems quite plausible — the emails were designed to sow doubt, fear, and confusion about the election and its security. When Wray spoke, he encouraged viewers to trust in the American election system.
"You should be confident that your vote counts," Wray said. "Early, unverified claims to the contrary should be viewed with a healthy dose of skepticism. We encourage everyone to seek election and voting information from reliable sources, namely, your state election officials. And to be thoughtful, careful, and discerning consumers of information online."
He added: "We are not going to tolerate foreign interference in our elections or any criminal activity that threatens the sanctity of your vote or undermines public confidence in the outcome of the election."
Neither Wray nor Ratcliffe mentioned any details about how Russia is interfering in the election or what it might use voter registration data for. It's not clear whether that's because the FBI doesn't have any details about Russian interference or if it is simply unwilling to share them for whatever reason. This, too, is concerning, because the despite Ratcliffe's claim that foreign election interference isn't a "partisan" issue, Trump himself has repeatedly tried to cover up Russia's intervention in 2016 on his behalf. There's no way to be confident that isn't happening now.
But there was another even more glaring omission in the pair's comments. Neither mentioned the fact that Trump — not Russia, Iran, or anyone else — is by far the greatest threat to the credibility of the election. He has been fueling bogus conspiracy theories that the election is going to be "rigged" for months, and he has called mail-in ballots a "hoax." So there was something ridiculous about the press conference emphasizing the threat of foreign election interference, especially as Ratcliffe name-checked the president as authorizing the intelligence community's efforts to protect American democracy.
"The president has instructed me to keep the country informed as appropriate," Ratcliffe said. "We will not tolerate foreign interference in our elections."
Wray's remarks about "early, unverified" claims that votes won't count, and that state election officials are the most reliable sources of information about the process, could be read as an implicit rebuke to the president. Trump has repeatedly contradicted local election officials in trying to spread doubt about the integrity of the vote.
And in urging Americans to be "thoughtful, careful, and discerning consumers of information online," Wray was, essentially, telling them to be the opposite of Trump, who has spread absolutely ridiculous conspiracy theories on Twitter recently. When asked to defend himself at an NBC News town hall, he said simply: "l put it out there, people can decide for themselves."
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Department of Justice agrees with spy chief John Ratcliffe’s assessment that emails published by The Post from a laptop owned by Hunter Biden are not part of a Russian disinformation campaign, a report said.
Sources told Fox News that the FBI is also indeed in possession of the Hunter Biden laptop that the emails were copied from.
The first story The Post published about Biden’s emails included a photo of a Delaware federal subpoena that show both the computer and its hard drive were seized by the FBI in December, after a computer repairman said he alerted federal authorities to their existence.
On Monday, Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence, said the emails were “not part of some Russian disinformation campaign.”
“Hunter Biden’s laptop is not part of some Russian disinformation campaign,” Ratcliffe said.
"Let me be clear: The intelligence community doesn’t believe that because there is no intelligence that supports that. And we have shared no intelligence with Adam Schiff, or any member of Congress,” he said.
Rep. Schiff (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, had claimed the emails were part of a smear orchestrated by Moscow.
Ratcliffe blasted Schiff for the allegations.
“It’s funny that some of the people who complain the most about intelligence being politicized are the ones politicizing the intelligence,” Ratcliffe said. “Unfortunately, it is Adam Schiff who said the intelligence community believes the Hunter Biden laptop and emails on it are part of a Russian disinformation campaign.”
1020
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/john-ratcliffe-back-his-bullshit-and-fox-news-loves-it
Trump administration and Fox News are trying to gin up a scandal that would do to the 2020 election what Hillary Clinton's emails did to the 2016 election. There's no reason that anyone has to play along with the deceit.
The short version:
- President Donald Trump's handpicked director of national intelligence, John Ratcliffe, is selectively leaking documents to pro-Trump outlets, usually Fox News.
- These documents relate to Russian interference in the 2016 election.
- Pro-Trump personalities at Fox use the documents to claim that Russian interference was a hoax, usually saying that Hillary Clinton herself ginned up the hoax.
- There is no reliable evidence for these claims. To the contrary, a bipartisan Senate committee found numerous ways that Russia interfered -- even more than Robert Mueller uncovered in his investigation.
- The Russia probe began based on intel that Trump 2016 campaign adviser George Papadopoulos has disclosed that Russia had political dirt on Clinton.
- None of this reality is reflected at Fox News, which keeps up talk of "Obamagate" as the election draws near.
- Numerous sources have told media outlets that Ratcliffe's redactions were deceptive.
Objectively speaking, there is no reason to be talking about Clinton's emails in 2020. She's not on the ballot, and a multi-year investigation by the State Department concluded in 2019 that there had been no mishandling of classified information.
dems congress am ppl cut off from intel on russia in the leadup to election
https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/propaganda-experts-blast-trump-dni-for-declassifying-unverified-anti-clinton-russian-disinformation
no lnx
Director of National Intelligence, pro-Trump former MAGA congressman John Ratcliffe, has just declassified and released what is being described as "unverified" Russian chatter and "disinformation" that suggests Hillary Clinton may have been in touch with the Russians in an attempt to help her 2016 presidential campaign.
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Ratcliffe, just hours before Tuesday night's presidential debate, sent a letter to Republican Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham, who is facing his own major re-election challenge.
The letter claims in 2016 "U.S. intelligence agencies obtained insight into Russian intelligence analysis alleging that U.S. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had approved a campaign plan to stir up a scandal against U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump by tying him to Putin and the Russians; hacking of the Democratic National Committee."
The DNI's letter then clearly says the intelligence community "does not know the accuracy of this allegation or the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect fabrication."
The Director of National Intelligence heads all 17 U.S. intel agencies and offices.
(Ratcliffe's installation as Director of National Intelligence was, according to some, illegal. Congress passed a law requiring the DNI to have prior "extensive national security expertise," which Ratcliffe, like his two predecessors, lacks.)
It took the President's son, Donald Trump Jr., no time to try to weaponize it:
OMG??????JUST DECLASSIFIED: The Russia hoax was Hillary’s plan, and the Obama-Biden White House was briefed on it. https://t.co/ytquclKKg1
— Donald Trump Jr. (@Donald Trump Jr.)1601407501.0
Intelligence experts and reporters are furious that Ratcliffe would declassify and release what they see as unverified Russian propaganda.
Intelligence analyst Eric Garland:
THE RATCLIFFE DOSSIER: Unverified, except obvious propaganda, no tradecraft, and less pee-pee. https://t.co/qLI2fk2lhA
— Eric Garland (@Eric Garland)1601407092.0
CNN national security reporter Jeremy Herb:
The latest declassification from Ratcliffe to Senate GOP: Russian intelligence that the Clinton campaign planned to… https://t.co/Vm55rnROmJ
— Jeremy Herb (@Jeremy Herb)1601406864.0
U.S. intel and terrorism expert Malcolm Nance:
Trump crony Ratcliffe sends a letter declassifying Russian intel report. It’s full of statements intended to look l… https://t.co/QRJRV9YWFq
— Malcolm Nance (@Malcolm Nance)1601407085.0
Politico Congressional reporter Andrew Desiderio:
To recap: The country’s top intelligence official just declassified a Russian intel assessment that he acknowledges… https://t.co/wpdJHhcEQF
— Andrew Desiderio (@Andrew Desiderio)1601405922.0
Democratic strategist Adam Parkhomenko:
Even for Ratcliffe, this is shocking. https://t.co/DDlGSg3sTy
— Adam Parkhomenko (@Adam Parkhomenko)1601406638.0
Former U.S. intelligence officer, current NBC News national security and intelligence analyst Ned Price:
This is less about tonight and more about tomorrow, when Comey will appear before Graham's Committee. Ratcliffe is… https://t.co/NmewLaUnPh
— Ned Price (@Ned Price)1601407273.0
https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/the-warning-lights-are-flashing-red-how-trumps-toadies-are-helping-him-collude-with-russia/
After reviewing classified intelligence reports about Vladimir Putin’s attempts to interfere in the 2020 election over three weeks ago, Senator Richard Blumenthal tried to sound the alarm.
The warning lights are flashing red. America’s elections are under attack.
This week, I reviewed classified materials in the Senate’s Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility and received a similarly classified briefing on malign foreign threats to U.S. elections. I was shocked by what I learned — and appalled that, by swearing Congress to secrecy, the Trump administration is keeping the truth about a grave, looming threat to democracy hidden from the American people. On Friday, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued astatement that only hints at the threats.
The facts are chilling. I believe the American public needs and deserves to know them. The information should be declassified immediately.
Blumenthal went on to say that what he learned makes “Moscow’s past interference and nefarious actions look like child’s play.” We still, however, have no idea of what shocked him enough to write that op-ed in the Washington Post.
What we do know is how the Trump administration reacted. Last Friday, the Director of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe, told Congress that his office would no longer brief them in person about foreign election interference, but would submit written reports. Clearly they don’t want to face probing questions from Congress. In defending his actions, however, Ratcliffe admitted that it goes beyond that.
[no twt]
ratcliffe’s initial argument doesn’t make any sense. He said that he is going to stop in-person briefings because members of Congress leaked classified information to the press. What he didn’t explain is how that would stop leaks. Classified information provided in writing is even easier to share with reporters.
In a scathing rebuke of Ratcliffe’s announcement, the Washington Post editorial board pointed out that the only so-called “leaks” came from the kind issued by Senator Blumenthal.
After the intelligence community briefed members of Congress in late July about threats to the upcoming election, Democrats expressed alarm about what they had learned — and about the fact that the information had not been shared with the American public. “The warning lights are flashing red. America’s elections are under attack,” wrote Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) in a Post op-ed, without disclosing any specifics…
[T]he only “leak” was the simple fact that the administration was withholding critical information about Russia’s interference — which, of course, is intended to help President Trump win reelection.
In that clip of Ratcliffe’s Fox News appearance, he eventually got to the point by saying that Democrats leaked information that “simply wasn’t true, that somehow Russia is a greater security threat than China.” In a case of obvious projection, Ratcliffe is telling us that the Trump administration doesn’t want Congress or the public to know what Moscow is doing to interfere in the election, but instead wants to change the narrative to focus on the distraction they’re offering about the threat posed by China. In other words, Ratcliffe is suggesting that he will now cherry-pick what intelligence is shared with Congress to provide cover for what Moscow is up to.
Added to that is a troubling story about yet another purge in the Justice Department by Attorney General Barr.
Current and former national security officials are raising concerns over Attorney General William Barr’s recent decision to remove the head of a Justice Department office that helps ensure federal counterterrorism and counterintelligence activities are legal – and replace him with a political appointee with relatively limited experience.
Barr has reassigned 23-year career professional Brad Wiegmann, who had been serving as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Office of Law and Policy. As ABC News reports, “The office shapes government efforts by ensuring that new policies and executive actions don’t violate federal law.”
We’ve heard stories from former Trump administration officials who have said that they often found themselves having to tell the president that the actions he wanted to take were not legal. As former DHS Chief of Staff Miles Taylor said, Trump would claim to have “magical authorities” to break the law.
Now Barr has removed the person whose job it is to tell the administration when they are breaking the law and replaced him with a partisan loyalist. While it might not be unprecedented to do that, the fact that it comes a couple of months before an election makes this one troubling. Here is the most telling part about Wiegmann’s replacement, Kellen Dwyer:
From 2018 to 2019, he served as a fellow at the conservative-leaning Leonine Forum, a non-profit organization that says its alumni are “committed to the cause of reintroducing the tenets of [the Catholic church] into the political, policy, legal, business, and cultural activities of society.”
The Leonine Forum was created by the Catholic Information Center (CIC), an extremist group founded by Father John McCloskey, who eventually left the organization over allegations of sexual assault. Several members of the Trump administration have close ties to the CIC, including Attorney General Barr, White House counsel Pat Cipollone, and economic adviser Larry Kudlow.
What appears to be happening is that both Ratcliffe and Barr are paving the way for Putin and Trump, who speak regularly by phone, to illegally collude in their efforts to influence the election—this time from the Oval Office with the entire federal bureaucracy at their disposal.
https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/democrats-slam-shocking-abdication-of-responsibility-as-intelligence-officials-scale-back-election-security-briefings
no lnx twt
Julia Conley / Common Dreams August 31, 2020
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) indicated on Sunday that his committee may subpoena intelligence officials, following Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe’s announcement that regular election security briefings will be scaled back ahead of the general election.
“This intelligence paid for by taxpayers doesn’t belong to Donald Trump, it doesn’t belong to the intelligence agencies, it belongs to the American people,” Schiff told Dana Bash on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Democrats expressed outrage over the weekend after Ratcliffe announced that lawmakers will no longer be receiving in-person briefings on election security, even amid concerns that foreign powers are attempting to interfere with the 2020 general election.
In what Democratic leaders called a “shocking abdication” of responsibility, Ratcliffe sent letters to members of the Senate and House Saturday evening, indicating that only written briefings will be provided until the November election and blaming leaks from Congress for the decision.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Schiff (D-Calif.) accused Ratcliffe of betraying “the public’s right to know how foreign powers are trying to subvert our democracy.”
“This intelligence belongs to the American people, not the agencies which are its custodian. And the American people have both the right and the need to know that another nation, Russia, is trying to help decide who their president should be,” said Pelosi and Schiff, referring to intelligence shared in a briefing last month.
On Twitter, Schiff accused President Donald Trump of “lying and projecting” after Trump spoke about the decision in a press conference.
“They leaked the information,” Trump said of Ratcliffe’s decision. “And what’s even worse, they leaked the wrong information. And he got tired of it. So he wants to do it in a different forum, because you have leakers on the committee.”
The scaling-back of briefings comes a month after Politico reported on a classified security briefing given to all members of Congress by William Evanina, director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center. At the meeting, Evanina acknowledged that “Russia is again trying to boost President Donald Trump’s reelection and denigrate his opponent.”
Democrats in the briefing urged Evanina to acknowledge the information publicly and denounced an earlier public statement he made in which he warned of potential election interference by Russia, China, and Iran.
The vague statement was “almost meaningless” and not helpful to voters, Democrats said.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer accused Trump of using Ratcliffe, a loyalist to the president who was elevated to his current position after serving in the House, “to hide the ugly truth from the American people—that the president is again receiving the help of the Kremlin.”
“DNI Ratcliffe has made clear he’s in the job only to protect Trump from democracy, not democracy from Trump,” said Schumer.
Previously, Trump and his postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, have overseen what critics call the sabotage of the U.S. Postal Service. Ahead of a general election in which millions of Americans will rely on voting-by-mail due to the coronavirus pandemic, DeJoy ordered cuts to overtime, the removal of mailboxes and mail-sorting machines, and changes to post office hours. The president has also baselessly claimed that the use of mail-in ballots will invite fraud, despite the fact that he himself has voted by mail, and openly admitted that undermining the USPS will ensure universal voting-by-mail is not possible.
In 2018, Special Counsel Robert Mueller charged 13 Russian nationals and three Russian organizations including a government-supported “troll farm” with conspiring to interfere with the 2016 U.S. election. Trump had long accused Mueller of leading a “witch hunt” and a “hoax” about Russia’s involvement. The Mueller Report, released in 2019, found that Trump campaign officials had extensive contacts with Russians and that many lied about those communications, but stopped short of accusing the president and his advisors of conspiring with Russia in 2016.
This year, former Office of Government Ethics director Walter Shaub tweeted, “if America has a legitimate election, it’ll be in spite of Trump’s best efforts to prevent one.”
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, who was at the center of Trump’s impeachment trial last year regarding the president’s attempt to bribe Ukraine to open a public investigation into Biden’s son, accused Ratcliffe and Trump of violating the country’s “national security and sovereignty.”
“For the DNI to curtail one of the most basic duties of our nonpartisan Intelligence Community—to keep the United States Congress fully informed about threats to our nation, in this case, about the real and rising threat of foreign election interference—is nothing less than a shameless partisan manipulation to protect the personal interests of President Trump,” said Biden. “And it is a betrayal of the oath sworn to the American people and our Constitution.”
https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/trump-is-on-the-verge-of-repeating-a-historic-disaster-by-pushing-the-wuhan-lab-hoax/
There’s a meme that appears now and then on Facebook and other social media: “Those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it. Yet those who do study history are doomed to stand by helplessly while everyone else repeats it.”
That’s funny. What’s not is that the Trump administration and its coterie of China-bashers, led by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and aided by Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton, have recently been dusting off the fake-intelligence playbook Vice President Dick Cheney used in 2002 and 2003 to justify war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. At that time, the administration of President George W. Bush put enormous pressure on the U.S. intelligence community to ratify spurious allegations that Saddam Hussein was in league with al-Qaeda and that his regime had assembled an arsenal of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. Fantasy claims they may have been, but they did help to convince many skeptical conservatives and spooked liberals that a unilateral, illegal invasion of Iraq was urgently needed.
This time around, it’s the Trump administration’s reckless charge that Covid-19 — maybe manmade, maybe not, advocates of this conspiracy theory argue — was released perhaps deliberately, perhaps by accident from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, the city that was the epicenter of the outbreak late last year. It’s a story that has ricocheted around the echo chambers of the far right, from conspiracy-oriented Internet kooks like
to semi-respectable media tribunes and radio talk-show hosts to the very highest reaches of the administration itself, including President Trump.
Unlike with Iraq in 2003, the U.S. isn’t planning on going to war with China, at least not yet. But the Trump administration’s zeal in shifting attention from its own bungling of the Covid-19 crisis to China’s alleged culpability in creating a global pandemic only raises tensions precipitously between the planet’s two great powers at a terrible moment. In the process, it essentially ensures that the two countries will be far less likely to cooperate in managing the long-term pandemic or collaboratively working on vaccines and cures. That makes it, as in 2002-2003, a matter of life and death.
Iraq Redux?
Back in 2002, the Bush administration launched an unending campaign of pressure on the CIA and other intelligence agencies to falsify, distort, and cherry-pick intelligence factoids that could be collated into a package linking al-Qaeda and weapons of mass destruction to Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad. At the Pentagon, neoconservatives like Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith set up an ad hoc team that eventually took on the name of Office of Special Plans. It was dedicated tofabricating intelligence on Iraq.
Just in case the message didn’t get across, Vice President Cheney made repeated visits to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, to badger analysts to come up with something useful. In 2003, in “The Lie Factory,” which I co-authored with Jason Vest for Mother Jones, we reported on how Wolfowitz, Feith, allied Defense Department officials like Harold Rhode, and neoconservative apparatchiks like David Wurmser, then a senior adviser to Iraq-war-touting State Department Undersecretary John Bolton (and now an unofficial advisor to Donald Trump on Iran), actively worked to purge Pentagon and CIA officials who resisted the push to shape or exaggerate intelligence. A year later, veteran spy-watcher James Bamford described the whole episode in excruciating detail in his 2004 book, A Pretext for War.
In 2020, however, President Trump is not just pressuring the intelligence community, or IC. He’s at war with it and has been busy installing unprofessional know-nothings and sycophants in top positions there. His bitter antipathy began even before he was sworn into office, when he repeatedly refused to believe a sober analysis from the IC, including the CIA and FBI, that President Vladimir Putin of Russia had aided and abetted his election. Since then, he’s continually railed and tweeted against what he calls “the deep state.” And he’s assigned his authoritarian attorney general, Bill Barr, to conduct a scorched-earth offensive against the work of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the FBI, and the Justice Department itself, most recently by dropping charges against admitted liar Michael Flynn, briefly Trump’s first national security advisor.
To make sure that the IC doesn’t challenge his wishes and does his bidding, Trump has moved to put his own political operatives in charge at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, or ODNI, created as part of an intelligence reorganization scheme after 9/11. The effort began in February when Trump named U.S. ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell as acting DNI. A highly partisan, sharp-elbowed politico and spokesman for former National Security Advisor John Bolton, he harbors far-right views and is a Trump loyalist, as well as an acolyte of former Trump aide Steve Bannon. On arriving in Bonn as ambassador, Grenell soon endorsed the rise of Europe’s anti-establishment ultra-right in an interview with Bannon’s Breitbart News.
To bolster Grenell, the administration has called on another ultra-right crusader, Kash Patel. He has served as Republican Congressman Devin Nunes’s aide in the campaign to discredit the Russia investigation and reportedly acted as a White House backchannel to Ukraine during the effort to stir up an inquiry in Kiev aimed at tarring former Vice President Joe Biden.
Following that, the president re-named Congressman John Ratcliffe of Texas, one of the president’s most enthusiastic defenders during the debate over impeachment, to serve as Grenell’s permanent replacement at ODNI. In 2019, Trump first floated Ratcliffe’s name for the post, but it was shot down days later, thanks to opposition from even Republican members of Congress, not to speak of intelligence professionals and various pundits. Now, he’s back, awaiting likely confirmation.
It remains to be seen whether the Grenell-Ratcliffe tag-team, combined with Trump’s three-year campaign to disparage the intelligence community and intimidate its functionaries, has softened them up enough for the administration’s push to finger China and its labs for creating and spreading Covid-19.
The Wuhan Lab Lies
As is often the case, that campaign began rather quietly and unobtrusively in conservative and right-wing media outlets.
On January 24th, the right-wing Washington Times ran a story entitled “Coronavirus may have originated in a lab linked to China’s biowarfare program.” It, in turn, was playing off of a piece that had appeared inLondon’sDaily Mailthe previous day. Written like a science-fiction thriller, that story drew nearly all its (unverified) information from a single source, an Israeli military intelligence China specialist. Soon, it moved from the Washington Times to other American right-wing outlets. Steve Bannon picked it up the next day on his podcast, “War Room: Pandemic,” calling the piece “amazing.” A few days later, the unreliable, gossipy website *ZeroHedge* ran a (later much-debunked) piece saying that a Chinese scientist bioengineered the virus, purporting even to name the scientist.
A couple of weeks later, Fox News weighed in, laughably citing a Dean Koontz novel, The Eyes of Darkness, about “a Chinese military lab that creates a new virus to potentially use as a biological weapon during wartime.” The day after that, Senator Tom Cotton — appearing on Fox, of course — agreed that China might indeed have created the virus.Then the idea began to go… well, viral. (Soon Cotton was even tweeting that Beijing might possibly have deliberately released the virus.) By late February, the right’s loudest voice, Rush Limbaugh, was on the case, claiming that the virus “is probably a ChiCom laboratory experiment that is in the process of being weaponized.” (A vivid account of how this conspiracy theory spread can be found at the *Global Disinformation Index*.)
Starting in March, even as they were dismissing the seriousness of Covid-19, both Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo repeatedly insisted on referring to it as the “China virus” or the “Wuhan virus,” ignoring criticism that terminology like that was both racist and inflammatory. In late March, Pompeo even managed to scuttle a communiqué from America’s allies in the Group of Seven, or G7, by demanding that they agree to use the term “Wuhan virus.” It didn’t take the president long to start threatening retaliatory action against China for its alleged role in spreading Covid-19, whilehe began comparing the pandemic to the 1941 Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor.
And all of that was but a prelude to the White House ramping up of pressure on the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community to prove that the virus had indeed emerged, whether by design or accident, from either the Wuhan Institute of Virology or the Wuhan Center for Disease Control, a branch of the Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. An April 30th article in the New York Times broke the story that administration officials “have pushed American spy agencies to hunt for evidence to support an unsubstantiated theory that a government laboratory in Wuhan, China, was the origin of the coronavirus outbreak,” and that Grenell had made it a “priority.”
Both Trump and Pompeo would, in the meantime, repeatedly assert that they had seen actual “evidence” that the virus had indeed come from a Chinese lab, though Trump pretended that the information was so secret he couldn’t say anything more about it. “I can’t tell you that,” he said. “I’m not allowed to tell you that.” Asked during an appearance on ABC’s This Week if the virus had popped out of a lab in Wuhan, Pompeo answered: “There is enormous evidence that that’s where this began.”
On April 30th, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a terse statement,saying that so far it had concluded Covid-19 is “not manmade or genetically modified,” but that they were looking into whether or not it was “the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan.” There is, however, no evidence of such an accident, nor did the ODNI cite any.
A Finger on the Scale
The run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2002-2003 should be on all our minds today. Then, top officials simply repeated again and again that they believed both Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent ties to al-Qaeda and his nonexistent active nuclear, chemical, andbioweapon programs were realities and assigned intelligence community collectors and analysts to look into them (while paying no attention to their conclusions). Now, Trump and his people are similarly putting their fat fingers on the scale of reality, while making it clear to hopefully intimidated intelligence professionals just what conclusions they want to hear.
Because those professionals know that their careers, salaries, and pensions depend on the continued favor of the politicians who pay them, there is, of course, a tremendous incentive to go along with such demands, shade what IC officials call the “estimate” in the direction the White House wants, or at least keep their mouths shut. That is exactly what happened in 2002 and, given that Grenell, Patel, and Ratcliffe are essentially Trump toadies, the IC officials lower on the totem pole have to be grimly aware of what their latest bosses expect from them.
There was near-instant pushback from scientists, intelligence officials, and China experts about the Trump-Pompeo campaign to finger the Wuhan lab. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the preeminent American scientist and Covid-19 expert, promptly shot it down, saying that the virus had “evolved in nature and then jumped species.” That’s because actual scientists, who study the genome of the virus and its mutations, unanimously agree that it was not generated in a lab.
Among America’s allies — Australia, Britain, Canada, and New Zealand — in what’s called the Five Eyes group, there was an unambiguous conclusion that the virus had been a “naturally occurring” one and had mutated in the course of “human and animal interaction.” Australia, in particular, rejected what appeared to be a fake-intelligence dossier about the Wuhan lab, while German officials in an internal document ridiculed the lab rumors as “a calculated attempt to distract” attention from the Trump administration’s own inept handling of the virus.
Finally, according to Bloomberg News, those studying the issue inside the intelligence community now say that suspicions it emerged from a lab are “largely circumstantial since the U.S. has very little information from the ground to back up the lab-escape theory or any other.” In the end, however, that doesn’t mean top IC officials beholden to the White House won’t tailor their conclusions to fit the Trump-Pompeo narrative.
John McLaughlin, who served as deputy director and then acting director of the CIA during the Bush administration, believes that we are indeed seeing a replay of what happened in Iraq nearly two decades ago. “What it reminds me of is the dispute between the CIA and parts of the Bush administration over whether there was an operational relationship between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda,” he said. “They kept asking the CIA, and we kept coming back and saying, ‘You know, it’s just not there.’”
Whether the tug-of-war between Trump, Pompeo, and the IC is just another passing battle in a more than three-year-old war between the president and the “Deep State” or whether it’s something that could lead to a serious crisis between Washington and Beijing remains to be seen. Ironically enough, in January and February of this year, the IC provided President Trump with more than a dozen clear warnings about the dangers to the United States and national security posed by the coronavirus, following clarion calls from China and the World Health Organization that what was happening in Wuhan could spread worldwide — warnings that Trump either failed to notice, disregarded, or downplayed through March.
Were Donald Trump not so predisposed to see the intelligence community as his enemy, he might have paid more attention back then. Had he done so, there would undoubtedly be many less dead Americans right now and he wouldn’t have had to spend his time in his own lab concocting what might be thought of as batshit excuses for his dereliction of duty.
By the time this affair is over, the invasion of Iraq could look like the good old days.
Bob Dreyfuss, an investigative journalist and TomDispatch:{ regular:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:, is a contributing editor at the Nation and has written for Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, the American Prospect, the New Republic, and many other magazines. He is the author of Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam.
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https://act.pfaw.org/go/82094?t=12&akid=14148%2E2556770%2EJ8W0GE
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https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/intelligence-chief-nominee-john-ratcliffe-dismisses-intel-on-russia-and-ukraine-as-hoax
no lnx vids
the ? day before President Donald Trump nominated him to fill the position of director of national intelligence, Rep. John Ratcliffe, R-Texas, appeared on the stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference to dismiss the validity of investigations regarding the president’s actions towards Russia and Ukraine.He also baselesslyaccused Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden of having executed a “quid pro quo” with regard to the firing of Ukraine’s corruption-coddling former prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin. The panel on which Ratcliffe appeared was titled “The Coup: Impeachment—Hyped Slimes and Nancy’s Schemer.” Charlie Hurt of The Washington Times also joined the panel. The identity of “Nancy’s Schemer” was never explicitly revealed.
Asked by moderator Vince Coglianese of The Daily Callerwhether he thought the Democrats had “learned their lesson” from their failure to remove Trump from office via ?the impeachment? process? or would instead “double down” on investigating Trump, Ratcliffe said he expected the Democrats to “double down.”
“And they haven’t learned a lesson,” Ratcliffe said of the Democrats, “despite the fact that throughout this process … whether it’s the Russia hoax or the Ukraine hoax—in every instance, the president’s been right. The president’s been the one that’s been telling the truth with respect to what’s happening.”
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Ratcliffe also took aim at the intelligence community he has been nominated to lead, saying that Trump was correct to complain of the actions of the FBI and the Department of Justice regarding surveillance that revealed contacts between the Trump campaign and agents of the Russian Federation government.
“President Trump was right when the law enforcement community and the intelligence community didn’t get it right on all of those respects,” Ratcliffe said.
An investigation by the Justice Department’s inspector general found errors and a falsification in the FBI’s renewal applications for surveillance of Carter Page, a foreign policy adviser to the 2016 Trump campaign, but concluded that the FBI was not politically biased against Trump in its investigation of Russia’s interference in the campaign. But that’s not the way Ratcliffe sees it.
The surveillance, he said, “was initiated in a Democratic administration with Democratic officials using foreign intelligence surveillance tools for political gain.” In the past, Ratcliffe has called for the prosecution of whomever leaked to Washington Post columnist David Ignatius ?the fact of? former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s? December 2016 convers?ations? with Sergey Kislyak, who was then Russia’s ambassador to the United States?.
According to leaders of the U.S. intelligence community, Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election in ?an effort to harm the campaign of Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee. Later, Flynn was found to have discussed with Kislyak—before Trump’s inauguration—the potential lifting of U.S. sanctions on Russia imposed by the Obama administration in retaliation for the election interference. Several of those calls took place the very day on which President Barack Obama imposed the sanctions. Flynn was charged with lying under oath to the FBI, and his case is currently before a federal court in Washington, D.C. (Flynn is currently attempting to withdraw his guilty plea, claiming to have received bad advice from his lawyers.)
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During the CPAC panel discussion, Ratcliffe also repeated the debunked claim that Biden demanded the firing of Ukraine prosecutor Shokinbecause the prosecutor was investigating Burisma, the Ukrainian energy firm on whose board Hunter Biden, the Democrat’s son, sat. In fact, then-Vice President Biden called for Shokin’s 2016 ouster in concert with leaders of the European Union and the International Monetary Fund because he was doing little to address the country’s rampant corruption problem, and seemed loath to prosecute members of the party once led by ?[[the Russia-leaning former ?Ukrainian president,?]] Viktor Yanukovich, the Russia-leaning former ?Ukrainian president who fled to Moscow during an anti-corruption popular uprising. In fact, Shokin was also dragging his feet on the Burisma investigation, which commenced before Hunter Biden joined the board. Shokin also declined to prosecute apparent corruption in his own ranks. According to The New York Times:
In one high-profile example, known in Ukraine as the case of the “diamond prosecutors,” troves of diamonds, cash and other valuables were found in the homes of two of Mr. Shokin’s subordinates, suggesting that they had been taking bribes.
But the case became bogged down, with no reasons given. When a department in Mr. Shokin’s office tried to bring it to trial, the prosecutors were fired or resigned. The perpetrators seemed destined to get off with claims that the stones were not worth very much.
Nonetheless, Racliffe claimed from the CPAC stage that Trump’s demand that Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky launch an investigation of Biden was legitimate, citing a video of Biden boasting of Shokin’s oust?er and the Obama administration’s demand that it must occur if Ukraine was to receive the $1 billion in aid for which it was scheduled.
“There was a quid pro quo,” Ratcliffe said, “and everyone saw a video of the quid pro quo; it was Joe Biden shaking down the Ukrainians and ordering the firing of the prosecutor general investigating the company that his son was a board member on, or lose a billion dollars. So the idea—one thing as we went through that process that you didn’t see, you heard the Democrats say, ‘That’s irrelevant. Don’t look behind that curtain. That has nothing to do with what President Trump did.’”
He went on to defend Trump’s demand of Zelensky for “a favor”—the investigation of the candidate then projected to be the president’s most likely rival in the 2020 election—before the administration would release military aid appropriated by Congress for Ukraine’s conduct of a war against Russian invaders.
“[T]he idea that there was not a prima facie case of corruption [regarding Biden] for the unitary executive, the head of the executive branch, Donald Trump, to raise questions about was ludicrous,” Ratcliffe said. “It was entirely appropriate for him to raise those questions, and for that to be the basis of a conversation with the president of Ukraine before agreeing to spend your money—American taxpayer money—to support President Zelensky and the Ukrainian people.”
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Ratcliffe, who serves on the House Intelligence Committee chaired by Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., was introduced to the CPAC audience by Coglianese as “a guy who’s in the front seats—he’s got to work with Adam Schiff every day.”
Schiff served as the lead manager of Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate. At the mention of Schiff’s name, the audience booed loudly.
“Do you ever boo Adam Schiff when you see him?” Coglianese asked.
Ratcliffe took a beat, then asked, “This is national TV, right?”
“Yeah, I think so,” Coglianese replied.
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Tags: Carter PageCharlie HurtDavid IgnatiusHunter BidenJoe BidenJohn RatcliffeMichael FlynnSergey KislyakViktor ShokinVince CoglianeseVolodymyr ZelenskyCorruptionFBIRussia InvestigationUkraineAmerican Conservative UnionCPAC
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/rump-to-nominate-texas-us-rep-john-ratcliffe-to-become-director-of-national-intelligence/
no lnx
Trump to nominate Texas US Rep. John Ratcliffe to become director of national intelligence
Written by The Texas Tribune March 1, 2020
By Stacy Fernández and Patrick Svitek, The Texas Tribune
Feb. 28, 2020
“Donald Trump to nominate U.S. Rep. John Ratcliffe to become director of national intelligence” was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.
U.S. Rep. John Ratcliffe, a Heath Republican, was nominated as director of national intelligence Friday, President Donald Trump said in a tweet.
“Would have completed process earlier, but John wanted to wait until after IG Report was finished. John is an outstanding man of great talent!” Trump said in the tweet.
The Washington Post reported the tweet was an apparent reference to an inspector general’s report about the investigation into the president’s campaign and Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
Ratcliffe could not be reached immediately for comment Friday.
The announcement comes months after Ratcliffe withdrew from consideration for the job amid claims that he’d exaggerated parts of his biography, like his role as the leader of an immigration crackdown while he was a federal prosecutor in the Eastern District of Texas. Ratcliffe defended his record last year but said he didn’t want the national security and intelligence debate surrounding his confirmation, “however untrue,” to become a political issue.
Ratcliffe has been a fierce defender of the president during congressional hearings. He gained notoriety for berating former special counsel Robert Mueller during his appearance before the Judiciary Committee. Ratcliffe also defended Trump during impeachment hearings of the president.
Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick tweeted his congratulations to the congressman. Fellow Republican U.S. Rep. Chip Roy of Austin called Ratcliffe “a good man” and said in a tweet that he supported the nomination.
The Texas Democratic Party’s executive director, though, said Ratcliffe’s nomination was an insult to the intelligence community and that his “entire claim to fame” was his interchange with Mueller.
“Deeply unqualified and highly partisan, he fits right in with the Trump Administration but the results will be terrible and dangerous for the rest of the country,” state party executive director Manny Garcia said.
If Ratcliffe is confirmed to the post, it could create a vacancy in Texas’ 4th Congressional District. The district, which covers the northeast corner of the state, is safely Republican.
This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2020/02/28/us-rep-john-ratcliffe-gets-director-national-intelligence-nomination/.
The Texas Tribune is proud to celebrate 10 years of exceptional journalism for an exceptional state.
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bit neglected re gig
Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-TX), President Donald Trump’s newly announced pick to be the next director of National Intelligence overseeing the 17 U.S. intelligence services, doesn’t have much experience in intelligence. Previous occupants of the position have had long careers serving in the U.S. Senate, military, foreign service, or intelligence agencies. By contrast, Ratcliffe, a former U.S. attorney and small town mayor, is a third-term congressman who joined the House Intelligence Committee a scant six months ago.
What Ratcliffe really brings to the table is a willingness to protect Trump from the implications of former special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election by parroting the fantasies of the president's most ardent Fox News defenders.
A few days after interviewing for the job, the congressman benefited from the opportunity to “essentially audition for the president” during Mueller’s Wednesday hearings, The New York Timesreported. If those hearings were Ratcliffe’s audition, then callbacks came Thursday when he used an interview on Fox & Friends, one of the president’s favorite programs, to play the network’s anti-Mueller hits to the audience of one.
On Fox, Ratcliffe claimed that the Mueller report was written by “a bunch of lawyers that didn’t like Donald Trump.” He suggested that the way “Russia really did interfere” with the election was with a “fake dossier” provided to Democrats. And he accused former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and former FBI Director James Comey of violating the Espionage Act, adding that the Justice Department probe that Attorney General William Barr has ordered could provide “accountability.”
“The big winner yesterday,” he added at one point, “was Donald Trump, because impeachment is dead."
[vid]
Trump is trying to replace someone who refused to operate in his personal interest with someone who will. Outgoing National Intelligence Director Dan Coats lost the president’s favor by loudly defending the U.S. intelligence service’s conclusion that Russia interfered with the 2016 presidential election to benefit Trump, and he has sounded the alarm that the Kremlin will target the 2020 elections as well. Ratcliffe, meanwhile, has adopted Fox host Sean Hannity’s moronic position that the “real collusion” during the 2016 election was between Russia and the Democrats.
Such a personnel shift can have profound consequences. Trump forced out former Attorney General Jeff Sessions because Sessions was unwilling to use the Justice Department to defend the president and punish his enemies. His replacement, Barr, had publicly indicated that he was willing to do so; as attorney general, Barr opened the investigation into the inception of the Mueller probe that Fox hosts had demanded.
Trump wants a National Intelligence director who will similarly parrot Fox conspiracy theories and use the office to the president’s benefit. In Ratcliffe, he believes he’s found his man.
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/trump-plans-to-install-a-crony-at-the-top-of-the-u-s-intelligence-apparatus-report/
no linx
Trump plans to install a crony at the top of the U.S. intelligence apparatus: report
Hudson Institute https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/
Written by Cody Fenwick July 28, 2019
President Donald Trump is planning to appoint Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-TX) to become the director of national intelligence, according to multiple reports including Axios and the New York Times. He will replace Dan Coats, who currently fills the Cabinet-level role overseeing the country’s intelligence agencies.
Ratcliffe is an aggressive defender of the president. During Wednesday’s congressional hearings with the former special counsel, the Texas Republican accused Robert Mueller of not following the guidelines of his office because he didn’t reach a prosecutorial decision regarding the president. Ratcliffe, like many Republicans, took umbrage with Mueller’s asserting that he did not “exonerate” the Trump, saying that “exoneration” is never a prosecutor’s job. Mueller, however, argued that the unique situation of examining potential presidential crimes was an unusual case.
Coats has long seemed at odds with the president’s view of the intelligence community and foreign policy. Most notably, he appeared stunned when the president announced that he would like to have Russian President Vladimir Putin visit the White House. He burst out laughing at the news.
“OK! That’s going to be special,” Coats said. The meeting never materialized.
Coats will step down in the coming days, the Times reported.
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Daily Caller: Experts: New Bill Could Stop Executive Overreach
8
JUN
DAILY CALLER: EXPERTS: NEW BILL COULD STOP EXECUTIVE OVERREACH
posted under: Conflict of Interest, Horner, Media Coverage
by Kevin Daley The Daily Caller A House panel approved legislation Wednesday that ends a judicial doctrine the Obama administration regularly relies upon when promulgating new rules and regulations. The Separation of Powers Restoration Act (SOPRA) repeals the Chevron doctrine, which requires that courts defer to a federal agency’s interpretation
http://dailycaller.com/2016/06/08/experts-new-bill-could-stop-executive-overreach/#ixzz4B7VbmWuN
House panel approved legislation Wednesday that ends a judicial doctrine the Obama administration regularly relies upon when promulgating new rules and regulations.
The Separation of Powers Restoration Act (SOPRA) repeals the Chevron doctrine, which requires that courts defer to a federal agency’s interpretation of the law unless their interpretation is “unreasonable.” Instead, the bill provides that a court should conduct a review of “all relevant questions of law, including the interpretation of constitutional and statutory provisions and rules” when evaluating federal rules and regulations.
Elizabeth Slattery, a fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, welcomes the development.
“This [SOPRA] would really bring back a layer of oversight because that really is something the court should be providing,” Slattery told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “When a rule is injuring a citizen and they’re able to come into court and challenge it, they should get real, meaningful judicial review and not this sort of ‘Well, the agencies interpretation is good enough for government work.'”
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Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2016/06/08/experts-new-bill-could-stop-executive-overreach/#ixzz4BrxldgYY}:
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https://projects.propublica.org/represent/bills/114/hr4768
| read the bill | read the bill |
|---|---|
| Sponsor | John Ratcliffe, R-Texas |
| Total Cosponsors | 113 (All Republicans) |
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Mr. Ratcliffe (for himself, Mr. Goodlatte, Mr. Marino, Mr. Chaffetz, Mr. Buck, Mr. Yoho, Mr. King of Iowa, Mr. Byrne, Mr. Brat, Mrs. Love, Mr.Brooks of Alabama, Mr. Babin, Mr. Salmon, Mr. Hensarling, Mr. Rouzer, Mr. Bishop of Michigan, Mr. Palmer, Mr. Messer, Mr. Mulvaney, Mr.Labrador, Mr. Trott, Mr. Mullin, Mr. Schweikert, Mr. DeSantis, Mr. Loudermilk, Mr. Issa, Mr. Westerman, Mr. Burgess, Mr. Culberson, Mrs.Lummis, Mr. Walker, Mr. Olson, Mr. Smith of Missouri, Mr. Kelly of Pennsylvania, Mr. Renacci, Mr. LaMalfa, Mr. Sensenbrenner, Mr. Gosar, Mrs. McMorris Rodgers, Mr. Collins of Georgia, Mr. Graves of Georgia, Mr. Chabot, Mr. Franks of Arizona, Mr. Farenthold, Mr. Griffith, and Mr. Smith of Texas) introduced the following bill; which was referred to the Committee on the Judiciary
June 14, 2016
Additional sponsors: Mr. Jody B. Hice of Georgia, Mr. Miller of Florida, Mr. Amodei, Mr. Bishop of Utah, Mr. Ross, Mr. Kelly of Mississippi, Mr.Knight, Mr. Walberg, Mr. Hardy, Mr. Allen, Mr. Forbes, Mr. Brady of Texas, Mr. Rokita, Mr. Stewart, Mr. Tom Price of Georgia, Mr.Luetkemeyer, Mr. Meadows, Mr. McCaul, Mr. Lamborn, Mr. Posey, Mr. Weber of Texas, Mrs. Mimi Walters of California, Mr. Poe of Texas, Mr.Gibbs, Mr. Ribble, Mr. Sessions, Mr. Sam Johnson of Texas, Mr. Hurd of Texas, Mr. McClintock, Mr. Marchant, Mr. Rigell, Mr. McHenry, Mr.Duncan of South Carolina, Mr. Guinta, Mr. Rodney Davis of Illinois, Mr. Fincher, Mr. Jordan, Mr. Gohmert, Mr. Barr, Mr. Garrett, Mr.Bridenstine, Mrs. Black, Mr. Flores, Mr. DesJarlais, Mr. Westmoreland, Mr. Yoder, Mr. Williams, Mr. Neugebauer, Mr. Holding, Mr. Gowdy, Mr.Shimkus, Mr. Carter of Texas, Mr. Graves of Louisiana, Mr. Tipton, Mr. Hill, Mr. Carter of Georgia, Mr. Emmer of Minnesota, Mr. Pearce, Mr.LaHood, Mr. Huizenga of Michigan, Mr. Huelskamp, Mr. Pittenger, Mr. Roe of Tennessee, Mrs. Wagner, Mr. Austin Scott of Georgia, Mr. Cramer, Mr. Rothfus, and Mr. Hudson
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