As expected, the Senate Intelligence Committee voted to approve the nomination of devoted Donald Trump toady Rep. John Ratcliffe as Trump's new Director of National Intelligence. An AP source says the closed-hearing vote was along party lines, 8-7; the nomination will now go to the full Senate.
Notably, the vote was chaired by new committee head Marco Rubio, the man of voluminous Bible quotes and no identifiable principles, after former chairman Sen. Richard Burr temporarily stepped down during the investigation into his early pandemic stock trades. Yes, it's quite the cesspool. No, nobody in the party seems to have had their fill of it yet.
The Republican-held Senate seems likely to confirm Ratcliffe, which is a big departure from the congressman's fortunes only last year. When originally nominated for the role, Ratcliffe faced significant opposition in the Republican Senate due to his lack of apparent intelligence expertise, his role as hyper-partisan Trump fluffer (including, specifically, his willingness to politicize intelligence in misleading ways), and most glaringly the discovery that Ratcliffe appears to have been lying, egregiously, about his own resume.
Ratcliffe remains unqualified, hyper-political and a liar. The difference now appears to be a Republican loathing of current "acting" "part-time" DNI Richard Grenell that runs so deep that, in the eyes of Ratcliffe's former detractors, even putting a chewed shoe in the post would be preferable to letting Grenell pretend to run things. Grenell is widely seen by critics as a devoted Trump yes-man installed in the role to bury or tweak intelligence findings displeasing to Trump; Ratcliffe's behavior can be expected to be worse.
How far down the rabbit hole is Ratcliffe? The new would-be director of national intelligence follows "Q"-themed conspiracy theorists on Twitter. The man is willing to go down some deep holes to find people praising Dear Leader, which is precisely why Trump has confidence he's the right man for the current job.
That's the short version. As the pandemic unfolds and Congress is distracted with 100,000 deaths, then possibly 200,000 deaths, Trump continues to purge government of any official seen as potentially disloyal, instead installing numerous Rudy Giuliani clones into those roles to act as protection (in the mob sense) and oversight saboteurs. We can expect Ratcliffe to continue to push the administration effort to invent sketchily premised intelligence charges claiming Trump's problems are due to the machinations of China, Democrats, or both. We can expect to come out of this with Ratcliffe committing at least one known crime, when all is said and done, because when you have a conspiracy-minded yes man with broad powers to manipulate government (see: Mike Pompeo, William Barr, etc., etc.) laws tend to be seen as optional.
