Another top member of the Trump administration is on his way out: National Intelligence Director Dan Coats will be stepping down after a tenure filled with frequent conflict with Trump. The source of that conflict is, directly, Russia. Trump has been infuriated by Coats' assessments of the severity of Russian election tampering, both in the 2016 presidential election and in ongoing efforts.
Coats has in fact been one of the most vocal government officials warning of Russian efforts to tamper with United States elections, warnings that frequently put him in direct conflict with Donald Trump's insisted-upon White House stance that those Russian efforts are "fake news." He also earned Trump's ire with testimony to the Senate that conflicted with false Trump declarations about the Iranian nuclear threat, ISIS, and the North Korean dictatorship.
The loss of the most senior Republican figure in the administration willing to push back on Trump's false intelligence claims may have dire consequences, especially with regard to the administration's new push toward military conflict with Iran and its insistence that, because theories of Russian intelligence interference on behalf of Trump are "fake," moves to strengthen U.S. election security are unnecessary.
In a tweet, Trump announced his attention to nominate House Republican John Ratcliffe of Texas. Rather than a no-nonsense intelligence overseer in the Coats model, the hard-hard-right Ratcliffe has been an animated conspiracy theorist who has repeatedly and aggressively worked to promote Trump's own theory that the Russian investigation was undertaken as a Democratic effort to undermine Trump rather than a legitimate investigation into an attack by a foreign adversary.
On Sunday, Ratcliffe again alleged on Fox News that there were "crimes committed" by members of the Obama administration in an effort by Democrats to "reverse engineer" allegations against Trump. But he was vocal in the election-year Republican shudder over "Hillary Clinton's emails," earning conservative fame for blasting FBI Director James Comey in September of 2016 for his decision not to prosecute Clinton. He is also a promoter of the Republican theory that FBI surveillance warrants against Trump campaign figure Carter Page, whose multiple Russian contacts before and during the campaign had alarmed intelligence officials, were both improper and themselves criminal.
Ratcliffe, in other words, is first and foremost a Trump loyalist willing to ignore and mischaracterize intelligence information to achieve pro-Trump ends. His final audition for the part was a performance during the House hearings with Robert Mueller, in which, in a bizarre chain of assertions, he attacked Mueller for allegedly overstepping his bounds in relaying that his investigation could not "exonerate" Trump, a performance that "thrilled" a watching Trump but was widely discredited as being based on an absurd and false premise to begin with.
If there was any doubt that Trump intends the new director of intelligence to be a figure who will undermine, rather than support, probes of Russian hacking and Trump campaign responses, Politico national security correspondent Natasha Bertrand further reports that Trump's first choice for Coats’ post was Rep. Devin Nunes, a figure deeply embroiled in repeated administration and Republican attempts to sabotage the investigation into Russian election tampering outright. Nunes, however, allegedly turned down the job and instead seeks to become CIA director after a Trump 2020 win.
With the potential installation of an anti-intelligence conspiracy theorist and hard-right partisan as intelligence director, any plans to either confront Russian hacking attempts or harden U.S. election infrastructure against identical Russian efforts in 2020 will likely be dead. The prospect of the other top intelligence position, that of CIA chief, being filled by a man who has gone to even greater lengths to sabotage even the investigation of Russia's acts is even more dire.
That dystopian prospect aside, it is not immediately assured that Ratcliffe will make it through the confirmation process unscathed. While being a conspiracy promoter with a long line of implausible and offensive Fox News statements to be picked through will not attract Republican scorn, some may be nonplussed by the lack of experience—and dignity—the conspiratorial House Republican would bring to the office.
