This morning begins the process in the Senate to consider the nomination of Trump bootlicker Rep. John "Rat" Ratcliffe (R-QAnon) for the post of Director of National Intelligence. You may be wondering, "Wasn't he already nominated for that post and withdrew?" And you would be right!
Let's step into the time machine and go back to the summer of 2019 to see what caused the Trump dead- ender's nomination to get withdrawn then:
President Donald Trump's pick for the next director of national intelligence, Rep. John Ratcliffe, R-Texas, has misrepresented his role in an anti-terrorism case that he's repeatedly cited among his credentials related to national security issues.
The apparent embellishment is related to two anti-terrorism financing trials in a case known as the U.S. v. Holy Land Foundation, the second of which resulted in convictions for several individuals found to have illegally funneled charity money to the U.S.-designated terrorist group Hamas.Shorter: he lied on his resume.
There was also this:
Donald Trump’s new pick for director of national intelligence played a role last year in popularizing what briefly became one of the right’s most easily debunked conspiracy theories about the investigation into the president and Russia, offering what he presented as evidence of an anti-Trump “secret society” operating within the FBI.
Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-TX), a member of the House Judiciary Committee, has been an outspoken critic of the FBI’s investigation into contacts between Trump’s campaign and Russia before the 2016 election. Like other Republicans, he seized on text messages between FBI officials Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, who were having an affair, as proof that the FBI had been biased against Trump in the run-up to the election.
One of Ratcliffe’s biggest contributions to the Republican pushback on the investigation came in January 2018, when he claimed he had seen text messages between Page and Strzok that suggested the existence of a “secret society” working against Trump. But Ratcliffe’s claims, which were subsequently amplified by pro-Trump media outlets, fell apart when the fuller text exchanges became public. (our emphasis)Bringing us up to the present, Rat's fascination with conspiracies apparently continues:
Ratcliffe’s official, verified campaign Twitter account follows several accounts on the political fringe, including a 9/11 truther account with just one follower besides himself and four promoting the outlandish QAnon conspiracy theory, which posits that the world is run by a cabal of Democratic pedophile-cannibals—and has been ruled a potential source of domestic terrorism by the FBI.
The conspiracy theorists followed by Ratcliffe, whose nomination for director of national intelligence goes before the Senate intelligence committee Tuesday morning, cover a bizarre range of beliefs. They posit that John F. Kennedy Jr. faked his death to help Trump to take down the Deep State. Others claim a Democratic sex dungeon exists in in a Washington pizzeria. But Ratcliffe and the QAnon promoters he follows have one thing in common: utter loyalty to Trump.
Even before Ratcliffe’s QAnon interest was known, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), a committee member, told The Daily Beast, “Congressman Ratcliffe is a partisan politician who has spent the last two years promoting conspiracy theories in defense of Donald Trump.” (our emphasis)Now we know where this potential Director of National Intelligence gets his "intelligence."
Here's an observation: Rat must have known for some time that he'd be nominated again for the DNI post, yet he didn't even have the awareness, smarts, and savvy (i.e., "intelligence") to scrub his account. Perhaps he's so deep in the right- wing conspiracy bubble not to realize or care that others might think he may not be playing with a full deck. For a potential DNI in any other regime, the lying on your resume would have been enough to end the nomination; adding to that the following of the QAnon flakes and others should be immediately disqualifying... except for one thing: his "utter loyalty to Trump."
That's the only qualification Trump and his rotted out enablers in the Senate care about.
(Photo: Rat on the right, rat on the left -- Ratcliffe with Rep. Jim "Gym" Jordan (R-Showers).
