The word is ?
The spys are NOT Happy….
There job is to find and report the truth…
THAT is gonna be hard with a political and novice new Director of National Intelligence appointed by the same Donald Trump that has never trusted the community that has never trusted him….
Rep. John Ratchiffe (R-Texas) IS a strong Republican Conservative …
He was nominated for the DNI job back in July of 2019 but dropped out of contention back then…
President Donald Trump’s nomination of Texas Rep. John Ratcliffe to serve as the nation’s intel chief has led to some apprehension within the intelligence community, which has only grudgingly come to accept the Office of the Director of National Intelligence as a force for good.
The office, established in 2004 to better coordinate the flow of information between agencies after the intelligence failures that led up to 9/11, has been most effective as a day-to-day manager focusing on bureaucratic and budgeting issues, intel veterans said — giving the agencies political top cover and more freedom to focus on their core missions.
But with a grip on the President’s Daily Brief, broad discretion over the agencies’ responsiveness to Congress, and responsibility for intelligence community whistleblowing and source protection, the DNI can easily veer into the political and revive the kind of friction that plagued its relationship with the intelligence community in its early days.
And Ratcliffe — an intel greenhorn with only one year of experience on the House Intelligence Committee and a résumé that now includes serving on Trump’s impeachment team — is the epitome of what intelligence officers “reflexively” reject, said David Priess, a former CIA officer and daily intelligence briefer.
“Anyone who does not come with extensive intelligence experience is automatically and quickly viewed as a threat because of the risk of the politicization of intelligence,” Priess said.
Those concerns are particularly acute given the abrupt departure of Joseph Maguire, the acting director who was forced out of the job after his office briefed lawmakers on the intelligence community’s assessment of Russian interference in the 2020 presidential election…
image…thedailybeast.com
This would be a truly disastrous and dangerous choice: someone who believes in the paranoid Alternative Theory of Reality (heavily promoted by our foes the Russians) over the unanimous consensus of patriotic, apolitical experts.
We’ll see if the Republicans in the Senate go along this time….
Last time they signaled they wouldn’t….