The Patriot Post® · John Ratcliffe vs. Deep State
On August 15, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Dan Coats will be stepping down, and President Donald Trump has nominated Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-TX) to replace him. “A former U.S. Attorney, John will lead and inspire greatness for the Country he loves,” the president tweeted. The reaction of the Democrat/Media Complex was instantaneous — and predictably monolithic. Ratcliffe is the worst of all possible picks because he is a “Trump loyalist.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) was part of the chorus. “It’s clear that Rep. Ratcliffe was selected because he exhibited blind loyalty to President Trump with his demagogic questioning of former Special Counsel Robert Mueller,” Schumer carped. “If Senate Republicans elevate such a partisan player to a position that requires intelligence expertise and non-partisanship, it would be a big mistake.”
Ratcliffe’s “demagoguery?” Democrats and their media allies were infuriated because Ratcliffe dared to point out that a disturbingly impaired Robert Mueller’s report contained “180 pages about decisions that weren’t reached, about potential crimes that weren’t charged or decided.” He added, “By doing that, you managed to violate every principle in the most sacred of traditions about prosecutors not offering extra prosecutorial analysis about potential crimes that aren’t charged.”
As for assertions of partisanship and loyalty, what was former Obama administration DNI James Clapper? Clapper perjured himself before Congress, denying the NSA unconstitutionally spied on the American people, was fully aware that U.S. Central Command reports on the Obama administration’s lack of success against ISIS were being altered to present a more positive political spin, and spent two-plus years riding in the “Russian collusion!” clown car, even though he admitted in March 2017 that the NSA, the FBI, and CIA had collected no evidence “of collusion between members of the Trump campaign and the Russians.”
As for Schumer, he’s the man who asserted in 2017 that the “nonpartisan” intel community has “six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” when Trump dared to doubt their conclusions regarding the alleged Russian cyberattacks. “For a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he’s being really dumb to do this,” Schumer added.
In other words, one is either a loyalist to an unelected intel community and their assessments, or one may be targeted — perhaps for removal by an orchestrated coup.
And if there’s one thing Ratcliffe made clear, it’s that he’s going to explore that possible reality. Democrats “accused Donald Trump of a crime, and then they try and reverse engineer a process to justify that accusation,” he stated in an interview on Fox News. “I’m not going to accuse any specific person of any specific crime. I just want there to be a fair process to get there. What I do know, as a former federal prosecutor, is that it does appear that there were crimes committed during the Obama administration.”
It certainly does, and if there’s one irrefutable reality surrounding the entire sordid affair, it’s that the FBI, the DOJ and the 17 intel agencies that answer to the DNI have turned “stonewalling” into an art form. “What is crucial to remember is that Ratcliffe not only has been a pit bull going after the conspirators in hearings, but he is a former prosecutor, the former U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Texas, a huge and very important district,” explains columnist Thomas Lifson. “With him calling the shots on the entire Intelligence Community, the stonewalling should be constrained if not stopped. Ratcliffe knows how to flip witnesses with threats of prosecution, and he knows people in the Department of Justice who can carry out the threats of prosecution on lower-level people incriminated in the cabal’s plot to overturn an election and carry out a coup d'état.”
The media are well aware of the implications and thus are attempting to find Republicans reticent to confirm Ratcliffe, despite their unassailable control of the Senate. “Some Republicans, however, privately expressed concern, including Senator Richard M. Burr of North Carolina, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who cautioned the president’s advisers that he considered Mr. Ratcliffe too political for the post, according to people familiar with the discussions,” The New York Times warned.
The other knock against Ratcliffe? “Multiple liberal politicos … are using the 70s-era phrase ‘speak truth to power!’ to describe the hapless fossil Coats and to suggest that Ratcliffe is too inexperienced and partisan to be Trump’s new DNI,” explains columnist Debra Hiene.
The Washington Post is apoplectic, quoting the concerns voiced by “a half-dozen current and former officers” who yet again remain unnamed, but worry that Ratcliffe “lacks any real experience, and perhaps more that he has embraced Trump’s ‘deep state’ conspiracy theories about the CIA and FBI.” The paper further asserted that Ratcliffe represents Trump’s “most dangerous move yet.” Thus, the Post lectures, “If Ratcliffe doesn’t promise to strictly safeguard the intelligence community’s independence, his nomination should be tossed.”
Americans might ask themselves how good a track record “experienced” members of the intel community have. The DNI was created after the intel community failed to foresee the 9/11 attack. With the possible exception of 550 metric tons of “yellowcake” removed from Iraq and sent to Canada in 2008, they wrongly assessed the threat of Saddam Hussein’s WMD program. They missed the Boston Marathon bombing, despite warnings from the Russian government regarding Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s radical Islamist ties. They missed the Russian invasion of Crimea, the attack on the Benghazi compound and, as The New York Times stated in 2014, almost everything the intel community “thought they understood” about Kim Jong-un and North Korea’s nuclear development “turns out to have been wrong.”
Thus as it was with the president, what’s really eating Democrats, the media, the Deep State, and some go-along-to-get along Republicans is the possibility that Ratcliffe will perpetrate the very same disruption of the contemptible status quo Trump did, among a community long comfortable with their odious track record of failure, coupled with their self-conferred ability to get any American “six ways from Sunday,” absent constitutionally attendant consequences.
Moreover, while Trump can order certain documents to be declassified, the several separate agencies that comprise the intel community “can approve or refuse to sign-off based on their specific intelligence interests,” Conservative Treehouse columnist Sundance explains. He speculates that Coates might have been replaced because he refused to comply with Attorney General William Barr’s request to declassify certain documents, despite Trump having granted Barr “decision-making authority that would override any cabinet officer who might block Barr’s request.”
For the last two and a half years, the Democrats and their corrupt media allies have insisted Trump is a Russian asset, and that our intelligence and law-enforcement agencies are above reproach. It was pack of lies — on both counts. Thus, one can expect the hysteria to be unrelenting, courtesy of those “terrified that Ratcliffe, like Barr, will expose the abuse of power, widespread corruption and media complicity behind the hoax, just as the 2020 election gets underway,” states columnist Julie Kelly.
It couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of constitutionally contemptuous co-conspirators.