That's pretty amazing. But I'm not at all convinced Trump will even read it.
Typical Trump response:
What about the people on the receiving end of Gina Haspel's torture program?Avril Haines, President-elect Joe Biden’s nominee to helm the U.S. intelligence community, is a national security professional described by her colleagues as hard working, experienced and willing to speak unvarnished truth to power.
But she’s a nominee who has quickly encountered pushback from the left over aspects of her record.
Haines, a deputy national security adviser to former President Obama, has perhaps one of the most unusual and eclectic résumés one can come across in government.
She has degrees in physics and international law. She rebuilt and flew a plane and owned an independent bookstore and café in Baltimore named after her late mother before serving in powerful roles across government in both the George W. Bush and Obama administrations. She has worked in the State Department, White House and at the CIA.
[...]
Haines is expected to withstand scrutiny during the Senate confirmation process for her role in the drone program, as well as her approval of a CIA review board decision in 2015 not to discipline agency personnel for intruding in computers used by the Senate Intelligence Committee when it was investigating the CIA’s enhanced interrogation program. Haines was also part of the team that redacted the committee’s report on the program.
Those actions have drawn harsh criticism from progressives.
“It’s incredibly concerning that somebody who tried to keep Bush-era torture under wraps and then covered for people who were spying on the Senate’s investigation on that torture would be elevated to such a position, especially under a Democratic administration,” said David Segal, founder of the progressive group Demand Progress, who opposes Haines’s nomination.
[...]
Haines also triggered criticism on the left for her endorsement of Gina Haspel, who was involved in the CIA’s torture program, to be confirmed to be the first female director of the agency under President Trump.
[...]
Those who worked with Haines in government have been perplexed by the scrutiny of her record and say it is misplaced. They note that she was a vocal advocate for human rights. Toward the end of Obama’s second term, her proponents note, Haines was instrumental in raising the refugee admissions cap when she was deputy national security adviser.
“She is so humane that she sees every governmental action from the perspective of the person on the receiving end,” said Harold Koh, who served as the State Department’s legal adviser from 2009 to 2013.
The Hill
I guess we'll see. If she gets confirmed. And I expect she will.A Biden-Harris transition official said Haines “strongly” opposed the Bush administration’s interrogation techniques and worked to ensure there were only “minimal redactions” in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s public report on torture.
[...]
Haines is also likely to face questions about her corporate ties. She was a principal at WestExec Advisers, a Washington consulting firm cofounded by Antony Blinken, Biden’s nominee for secretary of State, and reportedly worked for Palantir, the data analytics company founded by Peter Thiel. House Republicans have already sought to make Haines’s and Blinken’s work for WestExec an issue, and progressives have raised concerns about their corporate ties as well.
[...]
Former officials say that one of Haines’s most pressing tests will be demonstrating that politics is not influencing intelligence, in addition to repairing the relationship between intelligence community and political leaders following four years of the Trump administration, where officials were publicly admonished by the president when they provided assessments contrary to his viewpoint.
Count on it.Rather than operating as an honest steward of the large and important intelligence community, [John] Ratcliffe appears to regard the nation’s secrets as a place to hunt for nuggets that can be used as political weapons — sources and methods be damned. Even if the particular material he declassifies is not especially sensitive, the failure to provide proper context, sourcing or background only serves to confuse the public and distract voters.
That may be the point.
NYT
Mr. Ratcliffe, like Maj. Gen. Willoughby before him, seems to think his job is to serve only his boss, who requires that everyone agree with him at all times.
[...]
Creating a fictional narrative for political purposes requires corrupting a system that relies on in-depth, contextual and all-source analysis. However, if you are sending damaging signals to allies, potential sources or even your own officers, it is child’s play to concoct any story you wish by plucking selective details from the millions and millions of pages held by the intelligence agencies.
[...]
Hastily considered declassification of selective secret material runs the risk of exposing sources and methods, assisting foreign adversaries and undercutting the trust of our allies. And why would allies or potential sources be willing to share their secrets with intelligence officials who won’t hesitate to publicize their information if they see short-term political benefit?
[...]
Our allies and sources must trust us. And policymakers need to trust that intelligence professionals are providing the very best, unbiased analysis. If that bond of trust is breached, and motives and honesty are questioned, the intelligence is worthless.
Three hundred, forty-five, same difference.“As a U.S. Attorney, I arrested over 300 illegal immigrants on a single day,” Ratcliffe (R-Tex.) says on his congressional website.
[...]
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.
[...]
A third was a legal resident worker.
WaPo
Only because Trump's acting DNI isn't being nominated.Ratcliffe has made the immigration roundup of poultry workers, code named Operation Plymouth Rock, a defining example of his conservative bona fides.
[...]
Two people involved in the planning or execution of the enforcement effort said they could not recall Ratcliffe playing a central role.
A.J. Irwin, a former immigration investigator who was involved in the early planning stages before retiring, said in an interview that the operation was a costly failure.
[...]
Irwin said he raised questions about its goals and methods during planning sessions in 2007. Irwin said he questioned why they were devoting so many resources to a case he thought would net only low-level offenders.
[...]
“At the end of the day, it did not deliver,” Irwin said. “It was the biggest waste of money and hype.”
[...]
He dismissed Ratcliffe’s claim of having arrested 300 immigrants in the country illegally, in part because ICE agents and U.S. attorneys’ offices in five states were involved. Also, he said, federal prosecutors do not arrest suspects.
[...]
Leticia Zamarripa, a spokeswoman in ICE’s El Paso office who also participated in the operation, questioned Ratcliffe’s characterization of his role in the arrests. “No, that doesn’t sound factual. That sounds incorrect,” she told The Washington Post.
Zamarripa said she does not recall Ratcliffe being involved. “The name doesn’t ring a bell,” she said.
[...]
“Operation Plymouth Rock led to the successful prosecution of hundreds of illegal aliens,” the campaign brochure said.
[...]
Ratcliffe’s campaign literature later claimed that “as a result of John’s efforts” Pilgrim’s Pride paid a $4.5 million “criminal penalty.” The agreement to pay the money was not struck until December 2009, a year after Ratcliffe left the prosecutor’s office. The company did not admit wrongdoing and the government brought no civil or criminal charges against it.
[...]
Ratcliffe has dialed back his earlier claims that he had won convictions in a high-profile terrorism case as a federal prosecutor. His planned nomination has drawn opposition from Senate Democrats and tepid support from key Republicans.
Some current and former intelligence officials have said Ratcliffe is the least-qualified person ever nominated to oversee the country’s intelligence agencies.
His resumé.Ratcliffe has been a staunch defender of the president and has alleged anti-Trump bias at the FBI. Trump tweeted out his plan to nominate Ratcliffe several days after the lawmaker attacked former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III during a hearing.
But, hey. It's Texas, right?In 2004, he was hired as an assistant federal prosecutor in the sprawling Eastern District of Texas and was named chief of anti-terrorism in the office, despite an admitted lack of experience.
“My background isn’t in law enforcement and I don’t have any real specialized training,” he said in an interview with the Dallas Morning News in early 2005.
The only good thing is if he's confirmed, it gets him out of Congress. And with any luck, he'll only serve a year before Trump is unelected.The same year he became a prosecutor, Ratcliffe was elected mayor of Heath, an unpaid post he would hold for eight years while working for the Justice Department. In his run later for the House, Ratcliffe cited his leadership of Heath — a wealthy lakeside community of 8,000 that has a yacht club and a private golf course — as an example of his government service and fiscal acumen.
[...]
In 2016, seeking reelection, he claimed a central role in a major federal terrorism case. “There are individuals that currently sit in prison because I prosecuted them for funneling money to terrorist groups,” he is quoted as saying in campaign literature.
Stephens, Ratcliffe’s spokeswoman, did not respond to questions about which cases Ratcliffe was referring to. But the same news release refers to a high-profile case from that time. “In 2008, Ratcliffe served by special appointment as the prosecutor in U.S. v. Holy Land Foundation, one of the nation’s largest terrorism financing cases,” it says.
Stephens acknowledged this week that Ratcliffe’s assignment was not to prosecute the case but rather “to investigate issues related to” why an initial prosecution of Holy Land Foundation resulted in a mistrial.
“Intelligence should never be guided by partisanship or politics. Unfortunately, Congressman Ratcliffe has shown an unacceptable embrace of conspiracy theories and a clear disrespect and distrust of our law enforcement and intelligence patriots that disqualify him from leading America’s intelligence community,” [House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi said in a statement.
[...]
“Last summer, this nomination was withdrawn after revelations about Congressman Ratcliffe’s clear lack of qualifications and many misleading statements about his resumé,” Pelosi added. “The President is now ignoring these many serious outstanding concerns and letting politics, not patriotism, guide our national security.”
[...]
[Ratcliffe] was one of the president’s fiercest defenders during former special counsel Robert Mueller's probe and the House impeachment hearings in the fall.
[...]
Republican members of the committee often yielded their time to Ratcliffe and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who questioned the diplomats' political motivations and furthered conspiracy theories, such as suggesting Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election.
The Hill
Not this time.President Donald Trump’s new acting intelligence director, Richard Grenell, used to do consulting work on behalf of an Eastern European oligarch who is now a fugitive and was recently barred from entering the U.S. under anti-corruption sanctions imposed last month by the State Department.
In 2016, Grenell wrote several articles defending the oligarch, a Moldovan politician named Vladimir Plahotniuc, but did not disclose that he was being paid, according to records and interviews. Grenell also did not register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which generally requires people to disclose work in the U.S. on behalf of foreign politicians.
FARA is the same law that Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort and former deputy campaign manager Rick Gates were convicted of violating. (Manafort went to trial. Gates pleaded guilty.)
[...]
“There is real reason to believe that Mr. Grenell should have registered here,” Sanderson said after ProPublica described the circumstances to him. “This is exactly the type of circumstances I’d expect the Department of Justice to investigate further.”
ProPublica
I figured he'd do it. Refuse to answer questions - not resign.The acting Director of National Intelligence threatened to resign over concerns that the White House might attempt to force him to stonewall Congress when he testifies Thursday about an explosive whistleblower complaint about the president, according to current and former U.S. officials familiar with the matter.
WaPo
They've got two more days.The officials said that Joseph Maguire, who was thrust into the top intelligence post last month, warned the White House that he was not willing to withhold information from Congress, where he is scheduled to testify in open and closed hearings on Thursday.
In essence, Maguire was serving notice that he intended to cooperate with lawmakers unless the White House moved forward with a legal case to prevent him from doing so, the officials said.
Sure, Steph.The White House disputed the account. “This is actually not true,” White House spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham said in a tweet.
Another "acting" director Trump figured he could control.[Maguire] has at times expressed his displeasure to White House counsel Pat Cipollone and others that the White House had put him in the untenable position of denying the material to Congress over a claim that it did not fall within his jurisdiction as leader of the intelligence community.
Yeah, he's worried about going to prison.Since the whistleblower controversy erupted earlier this month, Maguire has been the target of harsh criticism from Democratic lawmakers who accuse him of blocking the complaint from being transmitted to Congress.
[...]
Maguire became DNI last month after the resignations of previous director Daniel Coats and Trump’s refusal to allow the deputy director, Sue Gordon, to step into the senior job.
[...]
In his only public statement on the matter, issued Tuesday evening, Maguire said, “In light of recent reporting on the whistleblower complaint, I want to make clear that I have upheld my responsibility to follow the law every step of the way.”
Joseph Maguire, the acting director of national intelligence, will testify before the House Intelligence Committee on Thursday. He disputed a report by The Washington Post that he had threatened to resign if the White House tried to block him from talking about the complaint before Congress. "I have never quit anything in my life, and I am not going to start now," he said in a statement.
CBS
I think it's pretty obvious.Presidents have, of course, acted inappropriately in the past, and our constitutional system has a framework in place for addressing misconduct by the chief executive. But it’s designed to deal with straightforward criminal activity, not national security threats. The special counsel regulations, for example, were created to deal with a Watergate-like situation as a worst-case scenario. So they take into account the need for an investigation insulated from political influence and give special counsels the ability to make prosecutorial decisions independently of the rest of the Justice Department or the attorney general. The rules even envision a report that might be made public.
This approach is appropriate when an investigation involves collecting evidence that can hold up in a court of law. But it is inadequate to address potentially noncriminal conduct that may nevertheless endanger the national security of the United States.
This split was evident in the report on the Trump campaign’s possible collusion with Russia in the 2016 election, submitted by then-special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. Although Mueller’s mandate was broad, and potentially encompassed a counterintelligence investigation, he narrowed the scope of his inquiry to criminal matters. The final report lays out only the decisions to charge or not charge individuals based on the evidence collected, noting only briefly that counterintelligence information was shared with the FBI for use in its (presumably ongoing) classified investigation. As a result, the public remains in the dark on whether Trump may be wittingly or unwittingly compromised in his dealings with Russia, or if the FBI and the intelligence community have information to explain his oddly submissive behavior with world leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin.
WaPo
That's why the framers gave Congress the power to impeach.Very few people seem to know what’s going on with the counterintelligence investigation: Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the House Intelligence Committee chairman, has said that his panel doesn’t know the status of the probe, or even if it’s still going on, even though the law requires the administration to keep the lawmakers up to date.
But counterintelligence investigations are stymied if they involve the president.
Rudy Giuliani has made it abundantly clear in this case.Counterintelligence investigations [...] seek to monitor and neutralize national security threats behind the scenes, which means the public has no way of tracking their progress. And the normal ways of resolving counterintelligence threats — like blocking a compromised subject’s access to classified information — don’t work with the president, who controls what is and isn’t classified and is the ultimate consumer of the intelligence the government collects.
[...]
In a normal case not involving the president, the inspector general’s conclusion that a complaint was credible and urgent would make it to Congress, with commentary from the director of national intelligence if he chose to add it. Congress would review the complaint and decide whether to take action: Lawmakers could hold hearings, request additional information from the agency involved in the complaint, and ensure that any misconduct is addressed or corrected within the agency.
[...]
If a call is about official foreign policy positions of the executive branch, for example, the president might have strong grounds to keep the content confidential — part of the president’s job is negotiating with foreign leaders, and to do that he must be able to assure his counterparts that their discussions won’t be made public. Even George Washington refused to turn over diplomatic communications to Congress.
And because the procedure for handling whistleblower complaints related to intelligence doesn’t address — or really even contemplate — what might happen if the president is endangering national security, there’s plenty of room for the chief executive to cloak unlawful actions in presidential authority, making them harder to detect.
[...]
Without oversight or accountability, neither Congress nor the public has a way to know, for example, if the president is using his powers as leverage for a country to confer a benefit to him personally or to undermine the integrity of our democratic processes in his favor.
Yea, how'd that work out for us?And if Trump wins any litigation, that might mean that even the ultimate check on presidential abuse — impeachment — would be nearly impossible on national security grounds: Congress isn’t likely to bring articles of impeachment if it is prevented from obtaining the evidence that would form the basis for them.
The framers of the Constitution did foresee the possibility of a presidential candidate who might be compromised or beholden to a foreign power: The electoral college was intended to act as a second fail-safe in the event of poor voter judgment, if a truly dangerous candidate came along.
A GOP wet dream, never mind Putin.Like the breach of multiple hulls in the Titanic, the mechanisms designed to keep our democracy afloat are giving way one by one.
I don't think this contradicts what Ukraine's president has indicated.Ukraine is ready to investigate the connections Joe Biden’s son Hunter had with the Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma Holdings, according to Anton Geraschenko, a senior adviser to the country’s interior minister who would oversee such an inquiry.
The Daily Beast
But there is this...Geraschenko told The Daily Beast in an exclusive interview that “as soon as there is an official request" Ukraine will look into the case, but “currently there is no open investigation.”
So, the guy who says he makes the best deals in the world lost that one. Smart move on Zelensky's part: Sure, we'll investigate your opponent, but it'll raise the stakes considerably.“Clearly,” said Geraschenko, “Trump is now looking for kompromat to discredit his opponent Biden, to take revenge for his friend Paul Manafort, who is serving seven years in prison.”
[...]
His remarks last week came amid widespread speculation that U.S. President Donald Trump had made vital U.S. military aid for Ukraine contingent on such an inquiry, but had tried to do so informally through unofficial representatives, including his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and Giuliani’s adviser on Ukraine, Sam Kislin.
[...]
Geraschenko reconfirmed his statements in a phone call on Friday.
[...]
According to the official readout on Ukraine's presidency website [of Trump's July 25 phone call to Zelensky], "Donald Trump is convinced that the new Ukrainian government will be able to quickly improve image of Ukraine, complete investigation of corruption cases, which inhibited the interaction between Ukraine and the USA."
[...]
Ex-MP Serhiy Leshchenko, the Ukrainian pro-Western politician and corruption fighter, has been in the epicenter of the scandal since Giuliani mentioned his name as one of “the enemies of Donald Trump and the USA.” The Trump attorney continued to criticize Ukraine’s leadership by saying that Ukraine’s president “is surrounded by people who are the enemies of the president [Trump] and people who are clearly corrupt.”
[...]
As a result of Giuliani’s statements, Leshchenko has lost a promising role on Zelensky’s team. “Both the United States and Ukraine are throwing Biden’s case at each other like a hot potato, pushing each other to begin investigating Biden,” Leshchenko told The Daily Beast on Tuesday. “I totally understand, and I don’t want to be in the way, since Zelensky clearly does not want to quarrel with Trump. The United States is our main strategic partner and I value that.”
[...]
Toward the end of August, the White House reportedly was considering whether to block $250 million of funds to support Ukraine’s military in its war against Russian-backed separatists. On Sept. 12, however, that funding was released, and even increased.
Explaining why his knees were shaking.Ukraine elected Zelensky and his supporters in parliament by a landslide earlier this year, largely in response to the alleged corruption of his predecessor and amid hopes the former comedian-turned-politician could end the war with separatists that has killed more than 13,000 people.
To bring an end to the carnage, Zelensky needs strong international support. He hopes to strike a peace deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin with backing from German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron at a so-called Normandy Four meeting later this month.
[...]
He demands, as did his predecessor, that Russia return the annexed Crimean peninsula to Ukraine, a non-starter for Putin.
[...]
“For now, we would like America to support us more, and not only with money but also with the newest weapons in our war against the aggressor, the Russian Federation,” Geraschenko, the adviser to Ukraine’s interior minister, told The Daily Beast. “We want a status as NATO’s special partner, allowing us to buy any weapons in the U.S., including the newest anti-aircraft rockets to defend our country in case Russia decides to attack from the air; our technology is more than 40 years old.”
[...]
Zelensky’s team is struggling to overcome war, poverty, and corruption. Clearly, the idea of helping politicians of foreign states win elections is not a part of his public agenda.
