Republican Rep. John Ratcliffe is appearing today in the Senate confirmation hearings that will decide whether he—an ignoble Trump sycophant forced to withdraw his nomination last time around after revelations that he lied about his own alleged experience—will become Trump's new director of national intelligence.
As Ratcliffe stumbles and blusters his way through each question about his outlandish past claims, willingness to politicize intelligence, and which laws he is willing to break for Trump, it seems only fitting for reporters to discover that the would-be head of U.S. intelligence follows a set of "Q"-minded conspiracy theory freaks on Twitter.
The Daily Beast notes that among would-be director of national intelligence John Ratcliffe's followed Twitter accounts are QAnon-styled weirdos who claim Hillary Clinton is "conducting child sacrifices," that John F. Kennedy is alive and has secretly arrested President George H.W. Bush, and the usual claims of secret pizza restaurant "sex dungeons" and whatever else consuming eight bottles of NyQuil will put into a person's head. And we should have expected it: As a House Republican—a Texas House Republican—there was absolutely no possibility that Ratcliffe would not self-associate with some of the worst conspiracy theories the far-far-right could dream up.
Whether Ratcliffe is a "Q" believer in addition to being a liar, a toady, and an authoritarian-minded deconstructor of American democracy is not clear. It is more likely that Ratcliffe saw posts here and there, retweeted by Ratcliffe's more mainstreamedly batshit insane fellow conservatives, that were so gaudily supportive of Trump and conspiratorial towards Democrats that Ratcliffe followed the accounts reflexively and is willing to look past the violence-provoking conspiracies in his eternal search for people willing to defend Trump with the same (cough) vigor he himself does.
In the meantime, Ratcliffe's nomination hearing is going precisely as expected. He has repeatedly asserted that the investigators who looked into Russia's 2016 election meddling found that Russia's tampering was unsuccessful in altering votes or election outcomes—but the reports made public do not make that same claim. Ratcliffe blustered about "depoliticizing" intelligence, which he still appears to believe means reshaping that intelligence so that it does not make Donald Trump look bad. He continues to be conspicuously unqualified and a hyperpartisan who has repeatedly proven willing to mislead the public about intelligence matters in order to boost Trump, a combination that even Republicans know full well could end in the overt manipulation of U.S. intelligence.
The hearing is more performance art than job interview, however. Intelligence chairman Sen. Richard Burr has indicated that Ratcliffe has his support this time around, even after withholding that support last time; this appears to be at least in part because Trump's pick for part-time "acting" DNI, Richard Grenell, is so universally loathed, distrusted, and presumedly corrupt that even Ratcliffe lying about his past resume is something the Senate is now willing to overlook. Trump has been successful in that regard, then: He has now gone through the ranks of hard-right sycophants to the degree that the Senate will support new unqualified, dangerous partisans just to remove prior unqualified, dangerous partisans.
Sure, a new director of national intelligence who counts among his daily reads accounts run by people who believe terrorism-minded conspiracies that an ex-president is under secret arrest and that "Pizzagate" remains real, no matter how often your reality debunks it. Of course. It will be like having Donald Trump Jr. run our intelligence operations, which will no doubt be Plan B if Trump gets bored with Ratcliffe as quickly as he has tired of other past hires.