The Red Wings regroup to beat the Penguins in Pittsburgh. Correspondent Josh Rowntree reports.
Day: November 13, 2024
There was a time when Donald Trump actually had to withdraw some of his nominations for cabinet posts over objections by members of his own party, not to mention Democrats. No longer – as the nominations of Matt Gaetz, John Ratcliffe, and Tulsi Gabbard to run three of the government’s top national security agencies in a second Trump administration show.
We’ll have a lot more to say about these nominations in the coming days, but suffice it for now to note some of the hurdles all of them face.
Gaetz, for example, Trump’s pick to be attorney general, was not so long ago at the center of a sex trafficking investigation by the Justice Department.
“How did Representative Matt Gaetz get into so much trouble?” Amy Davidson Sorkin wrote in The New Yorker back in April 2021. “There are so many allegations surrounding the Florida Republican and the carnival-like crowd of characters around him that it’s hard to know where to begin.”
The randy Floridian was ultimately never charged with a crime but remains the subject of a House Ethics Committee investigation regarding, among other claims, allegations he had sex with a minor. In September, he emphatically denied the accusation in an angry ”final” letter to the panel, adding that he never used “illicit” drugs as well. A new MAGA-led Congress could make that probe go away come January, but Senate Democrats can be expected to regurgitate all this stuff in his confirmation hearing—should he get one. The president-elect is striving to do an end-around with so-called “recess appointments.”
UPDATE LATE WEDNESDAY: Gaetz resigned from Congress today, effective immediately, bringing an end to the Ethics investigation.)
Same for any ongoing “deep state” investigations against him. Gaetz frequently railed against the FBI, CIA and Justice Department as a “deep state” combine that sought to bring Trump down. It’s no wonder, then, that he won Trump’s favor, not only considering the outstanding criminal cases against him personally, but as a soldier willing to carry out the president-elect’s campaign vows to arrest and prosecute his enemies in the FBI, Justice Department, Democratic Party and the media.
The “deep state” mantra, in which Trump and fellow MAGA Republicans depict federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies as a left wing juggernaut conspiring against them, has also been frequently voiced by John Ratcliffe, briefly Trump’s director of National Intelligence in his first term and now the president-elect’s pick for CIA director. During his time in Congress and as DNI, Ratcliffe frequently accused federal agencies of working against the interests of the American people and the Trump administration, singling out the FBI and intelligence community, particularly regarding their investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
During their first rodeo in 2019, Trump was forced to withdraw Ratcliffe’s nomination to be DNI after bipartisan questions about his qualifications for the office and concern over whether he had exaggerated his résumé. Critics, Republicans and Democrats alike, said he had embellished his credentials as a former federal prosecutor in East Texas, in particular boasting of having deep experience putting terrorists in prison and shaping the George W. Bush administration’s counterterrorism policy.
“In fact, while he was given the responsibility of coordinating any terrorism matters that arose for his office — a role every district was required to assign to someone — there were no significant national security prosecutions in that jurisdiction during his tenure, according to former colleagues,” the New York Times reported at the time.
“Our great Republican Congressman John Ratcliffe is being treated very unfairly by the LameStream Media,” Trump complained when he was forced to abandon the appointment.
Months later, however, in early 2020, the president was back pushing Ratcliffe as DNI again, this time winning his approval by the Senate. Then, in late September, on the eve of the 2020 election, whether prompted by Trump or not, Ratcliffe declassified U.S. intelligence “insight … into Russian intelligence analysis alleging that U.S. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had approved a campaign plan to stir up a scandal against U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump by tying him to Putin and the Russians’ hacking of the Democratic National Committee.” Ratcliffe’s letter to Sen. Lindsay Graham on the matter cautioned that U.S. intelligence had no idea whether the Clinton allegation was true or not— “The IC does not know the accuracy of this allegation or the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect exaggeration or fabrication,” it said. Washed in the MAGA media machine, however, the caution was bleached out.
No matter. Without objection, a thrice-vetted Ratcliffe will be headed to Langley in January.
It’s worth remembering, though, that the last time a Republican president appointed a CIA director with hostility to the agency establishment, it did not go so well. Porter Goss, a GOP congressman from Florida who had chaired the House Intelligence Committee from 1997 to 2004, made the cardinal error of bringing along his rightwing Hill staffers, quickly dubbed “the Gosslings,” whose strutting ways propelled senior leadership to the doors. After less than a year, Bush quelled the chaos by switching him out for Gen. Michael Hayden, a former head of the NSA. We’ll be watching to see if Ratcliffe runs into a similar backlash.
Tulsi Gabbard, too, evidently won Trump’s nod to be director of National Intelligence by bashing the “deep state” and the “weaponization” of law enforcement and the justice system against political opponents. The former four-term Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii left the party in 2022, which surprised few colleagues after her frequent criticisms of the Obama administration’s foreign and military policies, particularly in Ukraine and Syria. By 2024 she was firmly in Trump’’s orbit, joining him on the campaign trail and helping prepare him to debate Kamala Harris.
Gabbard had shown her impatience with the Democratic establishment in 2016, when she endorsed Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton. She made her own brief run for the White House in 202O, principally on a platform of opposition to U.S. military campaigns abroad, saying “every American pays the price for these wars that cost us trillions of dollars since 9/11.”
An officer in the Army National Guard who did two tours in Iraq, Gabbard drew sharp rebukes for her odd 2017 trip to Damascus to meet with its ruthless dictator Barshar al-Assad, whom the Obama administration was trying to oust, after which she said the U.S. should cease its aid to Syria opposition groups (at least one of whom was aligned with ISIS), and expressed skepticism about reports Assad’s chemical attacks on civilians.
She has also drawn fire for her views on Russia, embracing a critique, mostly on the left, that the U.S. provoked Vladimir Putin into invading Ukraine by swiftly welcoming former Warsaw Bloc states into NATO. Shortly after the February 2022 invasion, Gabbard tweeted that the war could have been avoided if the Biden administration and NATO had “simply acknowledged Russia’s legitimate security concerns.” In a bizarre turn earlier this month, she told Tucker Carlson that the Biden administration’s refusal to guarantee that Ukraine would remain outside NATO “just points to one conclusion … which is, they actually want Russia to invade Ukraine.”
Gabbard’s nomination to be DNI “alarmed some former U.S. intelligence officers and researchers of Russian propaganda, who recalled extensive Russian [social media] support for her during the 2020 presidential primaries,” The Washington Post reported Wednesday. “It’s crazy,” one former Russia analyst at the CIA told The Post.
Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark R. Warner (D-Virginia) said that he’s “got real questions” on whether she is too sympathetic to Russia. He had other Democrats, and maybe some Republicans who remain hawks on Ukraine, can be expected to lace into Gabbard as a security risk in her confirmation hearing—again, should she get one and not be made a “recess” or “acting” appointment.
Coming: takes on FOX guy Peter Hegseth as defense secretary, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem as DHS secretary, and a rumor that intel renegade Kash Patel may yet make it to Langley as the CIA’s chief operating officer. And who will run Trump’s FBI and NSA?
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NPR News: 11-13-2024 10PM EST
President-elect Trump chooses controversial congressman and MAGA-firebrand Matt Gaetz to be the attorney general of the United States. We break down Trump’s most jaw-dropping picks yet and how these loyalists might use their power on his behalf. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
