A cogent and accurate description. And, let's put to rest the idea that Ratcliffe's decision to terminate oral election briefings had anything to do with "security concerns." It has everything to do with Ratcliffe obsequiously seeking to satisfy his audience of One. /1
A little history of the tenuous position of DNI in the world of "alternative facts." Dan Coats had way too much integrity for Trump and their relationship was doomed to fail from the outset. When Coats had the temerity to stand up for the Intelligence Community after Trump's /2
trashing of the IC in Helsinki in July 2018, Coats was on thin ice. Having no pretense of fealty, Coats refused to back off the Intelligence Community Assessment that Russia interfered in the 2016 election, had a clear preference for Trump, and aspired to help him. /3
With Trump, adherence to these truisms gets you fired. So, Joe Maguire became acting DNI, but only after Trump's first attempt to have his puppet, John Ratcliffe, appointed. When that failed, Joe Maguire became acting DNI. But when Shelby Pierson, who had worked in the IC /4
for over 2 decades and had been appointed "election issues" manager by Coats shortly before his departure, accurately informed the HPSCI in February of this year that Russia was actively working to interfere in the 2020 election and had a clear and continuing preference for /5
the "current president," noted tattletale Devin Nunes informed the "current president" of Pierson's testimony. Maguire was gone in less than a week, to be followed by another "acting" DNI - Trumpist Richard Grenell, who only "acted" as DNI in every sense of the word. /6
Even the Republican Senate couldn't hold its nose long enough to confirm Grenell for the job, so he went on to the Trump campaign which is better suited to using his mendacity full time.
And we now have Ratcliffe, whose votes opposing his confirmation for DNI (44) exceeded /7
the "no" votes cast against confirming all of his predecessors combined. He is unqualified for the job - I said so a year ago when he was first nominated fpri.org/article/2019/0…
/8
So, it's no surprise that Ratcliffe will do anything to avoid his own "Shelby Pierson" moment - anything to avoid having ONI answer unscripted questions that cannot be dodged or fudged. It takes integrity and fortitude to "speak truth to power," and John Ratcliffe has neither. /9
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There really is no reason for professed "bafflement" here. Sacrificing any semblance of principle in favor of crude opportunism, the Brennan Center allied itself with the likes of Gaetz, Boebert, Biggs, Roy, and Taylor Greene - a group that couldn't develop a coherent /1
explanation of the 4th Amendment if you supplied them with a tutor, texts, and 2 weeks of study.
The 4th Amendment is predicated on the concept of reasonableness - it guarantees that Americans will be protected against unreasonable searches and seizures. Federal courts have /2
repeatedly held that the warrant is a law enforcement construct and is not a tolerable proxy for reasonableness in the foreign intelligence context. Instead, the 4th Amd, requires a balancing of the government's interest in protecting the national security against the /3
So, let me understand this line of bulls#it. If Trump carried a document upstairs with his cheeseburger and the information in that document was, just to cite a few examples: (1) derived from NSA having decrypted a complex foreign encryption system used to transmit information /1
unavailable from any other source where disclosure of the document would compromise this critical intelligence source; or (2) derived from a human intelligence source with unique access whose safety would be compromised by disclosure of the document or its information; /2
or (3) derived from an overhead system where disclosure of the document or its contents would compromise the closely guarded capabilities of this overhead system - I'm supposed to believe that there was a standing "order" that the document and its contents were considered /3
We're not writing on tabula rasa here. E.O. 13526 prescribes, at times in excruciating detail, the handling of classified information. Without disappearing into the weeds on whether a president can unilaterally declassify information (yes) without following any of the /1
notification procedures of E.O. 13526 (unlikely w/o amending the E.O.), there is no record of Trump declassifying any of the Mar-a-Lago information while president. Once out of office, his access to classified information is fully under the purview of E.O. 13526. This means /2
he needs to establish a "need to know" as required by §4.1(a)(3) of E.O. 13526. While such a requirement can be waived for former presidents (§4.4(a)(3)), there is no indication he ever asked for a waiver and one almost certainly would not have been granted given Biden's /3
Release of the warrant and property receipt, which are the only documents subject to the DoJ motion, may not provide materially more detail other than the criminal statutes identified in the warrant and, perhaps, a more particularized description of the focus of the search. /1
The guts of the predicate for the search will be in the affidavit(s) that accompanied the government's motion for issuance of a search warrant. There seems to be considerable confusion failing to differentiate between the affidavit(s) (likely signed by one or more FBI /2
Frankly, this is just political posturing. Not cheap political posturing, to be sure, because it would cost a fortune to implement, but posturing. Full disclosure, I gave 17 years of military service to spare my (middle class) parents the cost of college and graduate school /1
debt. I then paid full boat to spend my son to college and law school. Now, you want to take my taxes to relieve millions of the decision THEY made to incur college and graduate school debt. Did all these folks get their degrees and can't find any job? /2
I doubt it. If you finished school with a serviceable major, then there are jobs for you in this economy. If you didn't finish school or pursued a degree in a marginal field, that's on you (with the understanding that provisions can be made for those who /3
If the WAPO report is true, coercion of political activity is only one of the problems with this memo. Unprocessed raw collection resides in multiple data bases at NSA and “unprocessed” means not minimized. If these data bases include FISA collection, /1
especially if collected under a FISA section 106 order, then the approval was predicated upon using specific minimization procedures for USP communications because targeting foreign communications almost inevitably produces /2
incidental collection of USP communications. Ignoring those minimization procedures violates FISA, and FISA carries criminal and civil penalties for willful violations. Additionally, even if the collection activity occurred outside the US so that FISA does not apply /3