Last Call For Orange Meltdown, Con't

Now that the conventions are over and the campaign gets underway for real next week, the Trump regime is quietly making moves to cover up their election fraud.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has informed the House and Senate Select Committees on Intelligence that it'll no longer be briefing on election security issues, a senior administration official told CNN. It'll provide written updates, the official said.

Now ask yourself why the ODNI would refuse briefings on election security right before a presidential election?  Why would the regime not want Congress to ask questions directly to the ODNI's office, the people responsible for making sure the elections are protected?

I have a pretty good idea as to why.

Miles Taylor, a former Department of Homeland Security chief of staff, says President Trump's disinterest in election security and unwillingness to take a tough stand against Russia have made the November election more vulnerable to hacking and disinformation attacks.

Trump viewed any discussion about Russia’s interference in the 2016 election as attacking the legitimacy of his presidency – and ignored recommendations from his officials intended to help protect the vote, Taylor said in an interview.

During the first and only publicly acknowledged National Security Council meeting on election security in advance of the 2018 midterms, Taylor said, the president was dismissive, distracted and unwilling to issue a public warning to Russia and other U.S. adversaries to back off.

Instead of listening intently to officials briefing about the election threats, Trump talked about which counties he won in 2016, Taylor said. Officials were unable to convince him to issue a public warning that Russia would face serious consequences if it interfered in the midterms. Instead, those messages were largely delivered by lower-level officials.

“His bully pulpit was one of the things that we saw as most critical to keeping the bad guys from doing this,” Taylor said. “If the president of the United States stands up and says there are going to be severe repercussions, that sends a very different signal to a capital like Moscow than it does for the assistant secretary for X, Y or Z to say there will be consequences. But that’s what we were left with.”

A recent assessment from U.S. intelligence officials found that Russia is already “using a range of measures” to interfere in the 2020 contest aimed largely at hurting Trump's opponent Joe Biden.

“The president's attitude toward election security was effectively an open door to adversaries who wanted to meddle in our democracy,” Taylor said. “He has essentially offered up warm appeasement rather than tough deterrence. The consequences are evident in the fact that these countries have not been dissuaded from interfering. They have continued their efforts. In fact, more are getting in the game.”

Taylor is one of several former Trump officials to come out in favor of Biden in the 2020 election.

He's made no secret of his disdain for the president in a series of YouTube videos in recent weeks produced by the group Republican Voters Against Trump. Among his serious allegations is that Trump offered pardons to federal officials if they faced charges for actions aimed at limiting illegal border crossings.

But his criticisms on election security are particularly damning because they suggest the president is, at best, ambivalent about foreign efforts to undermine the very machinery of democracy.

He went so far as to argue the president’s disinterest in election security may be driven by an expectation that any Russian intervention in the 2020 election will help his candidacy, as it did in 2016. That’s a claim Democratic leaders have also leveled at Trump and Republican congressional leaders.

“Our biggest vulnerability from an election security standpoint going into this cycle is the president really hasn't made this a priority,” Taylor said. “He hasn't focused on how to keep governments like the Chinese, the Russians and the Iranians from meddling. And the simple reason is the president sees that interference largely as being beneficial toward him.”

The biggest single threat to national election security is Donald Trump himself. And the last thing Trump wants is televised hearings where the Acting Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe is on the hot seat saying Russia is in the middle of another massive operation to help Trump against Joe Biden while Trump is all but begging Putin to do just that.

The election is being compromised as we speak, and the cover-up is already underway.

Spies Like Us, Con't

With no sign that Rep. John Ratcliffe will be denied Senate confirmation by Mitch McConnell for Trump's new Director of National Intelligence, the nation's intelligence agencies brace for their new boss, and to see how they will be gutted to "drain the swamp", leaving our already badly damaged post-Snowden intelligence apparatus reeling and turning them into useless shells full of cronies loyal only to Trump and the nation vulnerable to outside meddling.

If confirmed, Ratcliffe will not only have to allay public concerns about the politicization of intelligence during an election year, he’ll also have to strike a delicate balance inside the administration between a demanding president seeking to rein in the so-called “deep state” and intelligence agencies that have long resented and resisted any perceived overreach from ODNI.
“When ODNI was first created, some of its proponents harbored grand ambitions, believing that the DNI could forcefully herd the 17 cats that make up the modern Intelligence Community,” said David Kris, the former assistant attorney general for DOJ’s national security division and a founder of Culper Partners.

But Kris said the role had since evolved, with subsequent DNIs focusing more on day-to-day bureaucratic issues, inter-agency coordination, and, sometimes, providing support in political battles.

John McLaughlin, who was serving as acting CIA director when the ODNI was established, initially opposed the concept when it was being debated in 2003-2004.

But, he said in an interview, the office “went through an evolution from 2004 through four directors,” reaching maximum effectiveness under James Clapper, who served as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and the director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency before taking over as DNI in 2010.

“Clapper figured out the secret,” McLaughlin said. “Let the agencies do their jobs and do only the things that the DNI alone is empowered (and authorized by the president) to do — mainly shaping the budget, coordinating tasking, briefing the president and Congress.”

How a Ratcliffe-led ODNI will view its responsibilities, however—and how Trump will empower the office as he seeks to tighten his grip on the intelligence community—is anyone’s guess.

The issue is particularly fraught given Russia’s continued interference in the presidential election, Trump’s reluctance to engage with his advisers on Russia’s malign activities, and his reported anger over Maguire’s willingness to brief congressional Democrats on the ongoing meddling.
What vexes intelligence veterans most, Priess said, is the prospect that a partisan director like Ratcliffe might take an active role in managing the President’s Daily Brief instead of letting analysts do their job -- substituting his personal opinions for the consensus view of the $70-plus billion intelligence community.

“That's the kind of thing that could prompt resignations of senior officials within the agencies,” Priess said, noting that Ratcliffe’s status as an outsider will make it more difficult to establish trust with the career officials.

Another concern “that’s not discussed nearly enough” is the role of ODNI’s legislative affairs office, said a former senior intelligence official.

“All of the legislative affairs offices in the intelligence community coordinate with, and often work through, ODNI legislative affairs,” the former official said. “So with a very partisan DNI, there could be some risk that you end up with a partisan shaping of what information goes to Congress.”

The risk is there even without a partisan leader. Maguire, the former acting DNI, pushed to cancel a public worldwide threats briefing to Congress last month because he did not want senior intelligence officials to be seen on-camera as disagreeing with the president on big issues such as Iran, Russia or North Korea, sources told POLITICO.

There's a very good chance that as ODNI, Ratcliffe will simply leave House Intelligence Committee Democrats out of the loop completely and only deal with Senate Republicans.  The Results would be disastrous to say the least, especially if Ratcliffe feeds Trump what he wants to hear and not what he needs to.

If you thought Trump was vulnerable to Russian manipulation before, wait until Ratcliffe throws out intelligence and substitutes his own opinions, analysis, and judgment on what intelligence agencies have to say.  Mass resignations of career intel professionals is exactly what Trump...and Putin...want.

Last Call For Ratted Out And Off A Cliff

Today Donald Trump pulled the nomination of GOP Rep. John Ratcliffe as Director of National Intelligence, not that Trump had a choice after Ratliffe was busted with a fake resume.

President Trump’s choice to lead the nation’s intelligence community often cites a massive roundup of immigrant workers at poultry plants in 2008 as a highlight of his career. Rep. John Ratcliffe claims that as a federal prosecutor in the Eastern District of Texas, he was the leader of the immigration crackdown, describing it as one of the largest cases of its kind.

“As a U.S. Attorney, I arrested over 300 illegal immigrants on a single day,” Rat­cliffe (R-Tex.) says on his congressional website.

But a closer look at the case shows that Ratcliffe’s claims conflict with the court record and the recollections of others who participated in the operation — at a time when he is under fire for embellishing his record.

Ratcliffe played a supporting role in the 2008 sweep, which involved U.S. attorneys’ offices in five states and was led by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, according to a Justice Department news release. The effort targeted workers at poultry processor Pilgrim’s Pride who were suspected of using stolen Social Security numbers.

Only 45 workers were charged by prosecutors in Ratcliffe’s office, court documents show. Six of those cases were dismissed, two of them because the suspects turned out to be American citizens. One of those citizens, a 19-year-old woman, was awakened in her home and hauled away by immigration agents, the woman said in an interview.

Two people involved in the planning or execution of the enforcement effort said they could not recall Ratcliffe playing a central role.

Trump announced on Twitter this afternoon that Ratcliffe would not be accepting the nomination.  With Coats stepping down, that leaves Deputy DNI Sue Gordon in charge.  Or it would, except she is not seen as sufficiently loyal to Dear Leader.

The White House is planning to block Sue Gordon, the nation’s No. 2 intelligence official, from rising to the role of acting director of national intelligence when Dan Coats steps down this month, according to people familiar with the Trump administration’s plans.

The decision to circumvent Ms. Gordon, who has served as the principal deputy director in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, will probably upset Republicans and Democrats in the Senate. They have expressed doubts about Representative John Ratcliffe, Republican of Texas, who is President Trump’s choice to be the next Senate-confirmed leader of the agency.

Mr. Trump did not allow Ms. Gordon to personally deliver a recent intelligence briefing after she arrived at the White House, according to a person familiar with the matter. A spokeswoman for the Office of the Director of the National Intelligence, Amanda J. Schoch, said Ms. Gordon was not blocked from attending any recent briefing, but she declined to comment about what happened inside the Oval Office.

Opposition in the White House to letting her serve as acting director has raised the question of whether she will be ousted as part of a leadership shuffle at the intelligence director’s office that will be more to Mr. Trump’s liking. 

A federal statute says that if the position of director of national intelligence becomes vacant, the deputy director — currently Ms. Gordon — shall serve as acting director.

But there appears to be a loophole: The law gives the White House much more flexibility in choosing who to appoint as the acting deputy if the No. 2 position is vacant, said Robert M. Chesney, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin, who specializes in national-security legal issues.

Ms. Gordon will retire if told by the White House that Mr. Trump wants someone else in the deputy’s role who could then rise to fill the vacancy created when Mr. Coats departs, according to officials.

So Coats is gone in two weeks, Gordon will be gone shortly, Ratcliffe won't be confirmed so he was pulled, and that means the search is on for a semi-permanent Acting DNI.

The Trump administration is taking inventory of many of America’s top spies, The Daily Beast has learned. The White House recently asked the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) for a list of all its employees at the federal government’s top pay scale who have worked there for 90 days or more, according to two sources familiar with the request.

The request appears to be part of the White House’s search for a temporary director of national intelligence—a prospect that raises concerns in some quarters about political influence over the intelligence community.

The request, which specifically asks for people in ODNI at the GS-15 level (the pay grade for most top government employees, including supervisors) or higher, comes as ODNI’s leadership faces turmoil. Earlier this week, President Trump tweeted that Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats will step down on Aug. 15, and that he plans to nominate Republican Rep. John Ratcliffe for the post. But Ratcliffe faces a contentious confirmation process that’s all but certain to stretch past the 15th, and the White House needs someone to take the DNI role in the meantime.

According to federal law, ODNI’s Senate-confirmed second-in-command—the principal deputy director of national intelligence, currently Sue Gordon—steps in if the DNI departs. Gordon, who has spent decades in the intelligence community, is revered there and on Capitol Hill. But as a career intelligence official, she isn’t viewed as Team MAGA. And the White House is reportedly eyeingways to put someone they trust in the top role after Coats departs.

That may not be as easy as it sounds. As Bobby Chesney of the University of Texas School of Law detailed at Lawfare, the law indicates that if both the DNI post and the post Gordon currently holds are vacant, then the president could choose from a fairly wide pool of people to take Gordon’s post and, therefore, become acting DNI. That includes any Senate-confirmed officials in the Executive Branch, and any senior employee who’s been at ODNI for 90 days or more—in other words, anyone on the list the White House just requested from ODNI.

It’s unclear why the White House asked ODNI for that list, but a search to replace Gordon appears to be the most likely explanation. A White House spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

So the plan will be the Trump Cabinet Special: oust the insufficiently loyal sap who wouldn't sign off on Trump's authoritarian rule, find a temp who will, let them run the place as long as it takes to find a confirmable yes-man.

And let's remember not even Mitch McConnell could deliver on Ratcliffe's confirmation.

It's All About Revenge Now, Con't

There's no doubt left that GOP Rep. John Ratcliffe has been nominated for the post of Director of National Intelligence in order to help Donald Trump bury the investigations into his criminality.

The comments from Rep. John Ratcliffe in television appearances and closed-door interviews with Obama administration officials questioning the US intelligence community's actions during the Russia investigation show how the Texas Republican aligns with the President's skepticism of the entire Russia probe, which ultimately became special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation. 

Ratcliffe was one of the key Republicans leading the GOP-run congressional investigation into the FBI and Justice Department's handling of the Hillary Clinton email and Trump-Russia investigations last year. Ratcliffe had a central role in interrogating FBI and Justice Department officials on how the investigation began, and it helped Ratcliffe get on the radar of the President, who often seized on developments in the congressional investigation and twice this year tweeted about Ratcliffe's Fox News interviews. 

A CNN review of the Republican-led interview transcripts from their FBI investigation, as well as dozens of Ratcliffe's Fox News appearances of the past year, reveal his deep skepticism of not just the FBI and Justice Department actions in 2016, but also of the intelligence community he would lead if confirmed to succeed Dan Coats as director of national intelligence. 

Ratcliffe's worldview that emerged from his role in investigating the Russia investigation will now be thoroughly examined as he heads into the confirmation process to lead the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, particularly from Democrats who are criticizing his selection as overtly political. 

While Ratcliffe didn't call for Mueller's removal or use inflammatory language like Trump -- he never called it a "witch hunt" or "a hoax," for instance -- Ratcliffe questioned the actions of the former special counsel, argued that the beginning of the investigation had tainted his findings and accused Obama officials of potentially committing crimes. The Texas Republican criticized both President Barack Obama's CIA Director John Brennan and DNI John Clapper, his potential predecessor. 

"Think about that, a dossier funded by the Democrats, peddled through the Obama intelligence community, falsely verified by the Obama Justice Department, then sold to the American people by those very same elected Democrats and willing folks in the media," Ratcliffe said in a March 24 interview with Fox News' Maria Bartiromo, the morning before Attorney General William Barr released his letter summarizing Mueller's findings. 

Trump signaled Tuesday that he expects Ratcliffe to clean house, telling reporters that he had picked Ratcliffe in order to "rein in" the intelligence agencies. 

"I think we need somebody like that that's strong and can really rein it in," Trump said. "As you've all learned, the intelligence agencies have run amok. They've run amok."

Ratcliffe is there to dispose of everyone in the intelligence community who has investigated Donald Trump or anyone related to him, and keep in mind these investigations are still ongoing.  They will be ended, and the experts, analysts, agents and investigators will all be fired.


Ratcliffe is also completely unqualified for the job.

Ratcliffe’s experience pales in comparison to any of his would-be predecessors. He served as the mayor of Heath, Texas—population 8,000—for a decade, and while he did a brief stint as a politically appointed US attorney in Texas in the final months of George W. Bush’s administration, his résumé on national security matters is practically nonexistent.

He had previously claimed to be involved in a single terrorism-related case, against the Holy Land Foundation, but appears to have far overstated his role. As ABC News’ James Gordon Meek reported Tuesday, “The fact is that @RepRatcliffe did not convict anyone in the Holy Land Foundation trial. His staff now admits he simply reviewed the first mistrial and issued no report to [attorney general Mike] Mukasey, which is why no one we contacted remembers him at all.”

Similarly confounding, he asserts on his House website that he once “arrested 300 illegal aliens in a single day,” which would have been quite a feat, since US attorneys don’t have arrest authority.

That lack of experience is almost certain to make Ratcliffe an ineffective DNI, a position that has little direct power and whose few levers and moral suasion only Clapper—the longest-serving DNI yet—managed to handle effectively.

But while Ratcliffe will likely have trouble herding the cats that make up the nation’s 17 sprawling intelligence agencies, ranging from the Justice Department to the State Department to the Pentagon to even the Energy Department, that’s not what seems primed to make him a dangerous DNI.

The biggest danger Ratcliffe poses is to the integrity of the job of director of national intelligence in the first place; the core principle of the intelligence professional is to speak truth to power.

Instead, Trump will have another smarmy, lying, yes-man in the position, whose real job will be firing hundreds, maybe thousands of personnel in a mass purge, something Vladimir Putin is salivating over.

When Trump and Attorney General Bill Barr turn the country's law enforcement against Trump enemies and the arrests begin, it will be Ratcliffe's job to justify the intelligence used for the deed.

It will be ugly.

It's All About Revenge Now, Con't

Trump's new Director of National Intelligence nominee, Rep. John Ratcliffe, has been given his marching orders right out of the gate, and it's to help Attorney General William Barr arrest and prosecute Democrats.

Mr. Ratcliffe met privately with Mr. Trump at the White House July 19 to discuss taking the job, administration officials said.

Mr. Ratcliffe sharply questioned Robert S. Mueller III, the former special counsel, at last week’s hearing and accused him of not following Justice Department guidelines after Mr. Mueller said he could not exonerate the president of obstruction of justice charges.

If a special counsel cannot bring charges, Mr. Ratcliffe argued, he should not presume to say a target was not cleared.

“So, Americans need to know this as they listen to the Democrats and socialists on the other side of the aisle as they do dramatic readings from this report,” Mr. Ratcliffe said of the part of Mr. Mueller’s report that described how the president sought to impede the investigation, “that Volume II of this report was not authorized under the law to be written.”

On Sunday morning, Mr. Ratcliffe said on Fox News that Democrats “accused Donald Trump of a crime, and then they try and reverse engineer a process to justify that accusation.”

“I’m not going to accuse any specific person of any specific crime, I just want there to be a fair process to get there,” he added. “What I do know, as a former federal prosecutor, is that it does appear that there were crimes committed during the Obama administration.”

Both Barr and Ratcliffe are on board, and Ratcliffe will sail through Senate confirmation, no matter what Intelligence Committee Chair GOP Sen. Richard Burr thinks, because Trump will hang him up and butcher him like a side of beef if he doesn't.

“Now the things that Bob Mueller said he didn’t know about and his team clearly didn’t look at, those are things that would be fair for Bill Barr and the Department of Justice to look at. Because we know that things happened in the Obama administration that haven’t been answered. There’s been no accountability for that yet," Ratcliffe said.

“Well, the special counsel told us ... that they didn't do it. And if they didn't do it, the only place we can get the answers is from the Justice Department right now," Ratcliffe said. "The American people want that. Their faith and trust, Maria, has been shaken in our Justice Department, and the only way to get that back is for there to be real accountability with a very fair process. Again, I have supreme confidence in Bill Barr's ability to deliver that. And at the end of the day, wherever the outcome may be, as long as we know that the process was fair, the evaluation was fair, justice will be done. Look, the truth always defends itself.”

Again, we have the new AG and now potential new DNI promising the investigations of and possible arrests and indictments of former Obama administration officials, most likely coming over the next 12 months, possibly leading up to Obama himself.

Does anyone here think Trump is somehow above trying to put Barack Obama in jail in order to feed his base the ultimate red meat hate stew?