With Ratcliffe's claim that the Mueller report was written by “Hillary Clinton’s de facto legal team,” it appears that Trump has found a Director of National Intelligence as skeptical of the Russian threat as he is
Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images President Trump has never been too fond of the U.S. intelligence community’s consensus on Russia — that the country represents a major threat to U.S. interests — instead siding with, say, President Vladimir Putin’s assessment that the Russian threat has been exaggerated.
On the Trump-Russia relationship, Ratcliffe has been particularly willing to accept the president’s side of things. At the Mueller testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, the Texas representative accused the special counsel of breaking Justice Department guidelines by stating that the report did not exonerate the president on obstruction of justice.
Like so many Trump allies who appear on Fox News targeting an audience of one, it appears that Ratcliffe may have catered his Mueller testimony comments to appeal to the president. Ratcliffe reportedly met with Trump the Friday before the Mueller hearings to discuss possibly replacing Coats in the DNI position.
In his two-plus years serving as the president’s “principal adviser” on “intelligence matters related to national security” — responsible for oversight of the FBI, CIA, NSA, and offices within the State Department, the Pentagon, and the Department of Energy — Dan Coats’s strategy as director of National Intelligence was to support the intelligence community independent of the president’s insults or claims that ran contrary to intelligence-community positions.
Earlier this month, Axios reported that Trump considered the DNI Office “an unnecessary bureaucratic layer and that he would like to get rid of it.” Though that wish was politically infeasible, he may have found the next best thing: a lock-step supporter doubtful of the project he oversees who is prepared to defend him on the political threat that his past with Russia represents and the growing threat the country presents moving into 2020.
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