Greg Sargent: John Ratcliffe made a huge mistake that's been overlooked

[Nevilledog]

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Greg Sargent
@ThePlumLineGS
·
Oct 22, 2020
John Ratcliffe made a huge mistake that's been overlooked. He noted in passing that claims about voter fraud are disinformation that hurts our country. But Trump and Barr make precisely these claims on a regular basis. Trump's own DNI just blew them up:

Opinion | How the Iran news actually undermines one of Trump’s biggest lies
Trump's own director of national intelligence accidentally gives away the president's game.
washingtonpost.com

Greg Sargent
@ThePlumLineGS
Ratcliffe says video spread by Iran that features claims about voter fraud is disinformation designed to harm our country.

The video features Trump himself making those claims.

I talked to former NSC official @jgeltzer about what this means. It's bad:

https://washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/10/22/how-iran-news-actually-undermines-one-trumps-biggest-lies/…
Image

[honest.abe]

1. Ratcliffe is a totally unqualified Trump loyalist and former ambulance chaser lawyer

Perhaps the clearest sign that three-term Texas congressman Ratcliffe is manifestly unqualified to serve as the nation’s director of national intelligence isn’t the fact that he embellished his résumé, nor that only a minority of the US Senate would vote to confirm him, nor that the first time he was floated for the post last summer he was so soundly rejected that he withdrew almost immediately.

Instead, it’s that years before just 49 senators of the 116th Congress—all Republicans—voted to confirm him last week as the head of the nation’s 17 intelligence agencies and the president’s top intelligence adviser, the 108th Congress tried to stop a man like Ratcliffe from assuming that very role in the first place. They wrote into the law that created the job, 50 US Code § 3023, “Any individual nominated for appointment as Director of National Intelligence shall have extensive national security expertise.”

A longtime personal injury and medical malpractice lawyer, Ratcliffe once told his law school alumni magazine, “I just wanted to hang out my shingle and start making money.” He served a decade as the part-time mayor of Heath, Texas, (population 8,000) and, midway through his career, spent four years as a federal prosecutor in Texas. Elected to Congress in 2014 on the Tea Party wave, he has served in Congress for five years and is in his first term on the House intelligence committee.

When the congressman’s name was floated for DNI last summer, the already-thin justification of his national security “experience” evaporated almost immediately. Precisely two sentences of his official biography dealt with anything related to national security. Both proved to be inaccurate embellishments.

https://www.wired.com/story/john-ratcliffe-director-of-national-intelligence/

Anything he is involved in is sure to be a lie to protect Trump.

[dalton99a]

2. Kick