More on Ratcliffe

THE PRESIDENT’S INTENT to nominate Robert Mueller’s chief Capitol Hill inquisitor to head the nation’s intelligence community might just be the Trump administration’s most alarming personnel decision yet.

[...]

“I don’t know John. I’ve met him a couple times, seen him on TV,” Senate Homeland Security Committee chair Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin) told Politico, among other choice quotes it gathered.

[...]

Axios scooped the news of Ratcliffe’s impending nomination, saying Trump was “thrilled” by the congressman’s performance at the Mueller hearing.

[...]

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.

[...]

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.

[...]

[T]he core principle of the intelligence professional is to speak truth to power.

  Wired

Was.

The US spends $60 billion a year on the nation’s intelligence apparatus, a workforce of tens of thousands ranging from CIA officers and FBI agents to NSA cryptologists and hackers, NGA analysts, interpretation experts at the NRO, financial wizards at the Treasury Department’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis, and much more.

All of that money and all of those workers share a simple uniting goal: To ensure that the president of the United States is, in every conversation and decision, the most informed, knowledgeable, best-prepared person in the room.

No longer needed. Trump's gut is better than anyone's brain. He said so himself.

The rare instances where the CIA or other agencies have skewed their intelligence toward political ends, as with the run-up to the Iraq War, only underscore the devastating consequences of anything less than fair-eyed analysis.

[...]

[Dan] Coats did try to speak truth to power. He spoke up when it mattered, was honest about Russia’s attack on the 2016 election, and was willing to contradict Trump publicly on the future of North Korea’s nuclear program. One of Coats’ final acts as DNI actually was to appoint the nation’s first election security czar. That honesty appears to be a not insignificant part of why Coats was shoved aside, and ultimately out the door.

[...]

There’s little evidence that Ratcliffe is the man for the job. Beyond his antics cross-examining Mueller last week, he’s long been on the leading edge of criticizing the Russia investigation writ large. He was even the congressman who started the completely false rumor that the FBI—one of the intel agencies he is set to oversee—had an anti-Trump “secret society.”

Ratcliffe seems to appeal to Trump for the same reason most of the sycophants around him do: Loyalty first and foremost to No. 1.

Number 1 is a big, fat, smelly Number 2.

But the DNI is not supposed to walk through the door of the Oval Office attempting to please the president—he is supposed to tell the president whatever he needs to hear, consequences be damned.

Trump wants nothing of the kind. Instead, as he told reporters Tuesday afternoon, “We need somebody strong that can really rein it in. Because as I think you've all learned, the intelligence agencies have run amok. They've run amok.”

He's not wrong about that, but he happens to be only talking about what he perceives as disloyalty to himself.

The fact that Trump, who has skirmished with the intelligence community ever since the campaign, still sees the truth-telling tradition of the intelligence world as making them his adversaries rather than his allies underscores how little Donald Trump has risen to the role of the commander-in-chief. As The New Yorker’s David Rohde wrote this week, the message Trump sends with Ratcliffe's appointment is clear: Be loyal or leave.

That was his first and lasting message. It's all that matters to him.

The idea that a person prone to wild conspiracy theories might soon occupy the role legally designated to be the final voice in the president’s ear on intelligence matters should terrify Americans—as well as both its allies and adversaries the world over. The fact that Senate GOP members have so far been relatively muted in their support for Ratcliffe encourages hope that maybe this disaster-in-waiting might be averted.

Muted support is still support.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.