berg80
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- Oct 28, 2017
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Clayton confirmation hearing postponed as Trump tries to push Senate on voter ID bill
Clayton confirmation hearing postponed as Trump tries to push Senate on voter ID bill
A key Republican senator, Tom Cotton, had vowed to push forward with a hearing anyway, but Trump eventually directed Clayton to not appear for his confirmation proceedings, forcing Cotton, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, to announce that the hearing was postponed.
www.pbs.org
Besides his painfully obvious lack of qualifications (required by statute) the biggest concern over Pulte's choice as acting DNI was whether he would enable Don's obsession with creating doubt about the integrity of elections. That fear has been realized.
‘Horrifying’: Pulte’s choice for top spy aide stokes fears of Trump vote tampering
Bill Pulte, the acting director of national intelligence, has stirred fear by choosing as his chief of staff a GOP election lawyer who oversaw a poll watching program that included Jack Posobiec and other conservative conspiracy theorists. The lawyer, Christina Norton, also appears to have no experience working in the intelligence community.“It is horrfiying,” a former senior U.S. intelligence official told MS NOW Saturday. “Not only does Norton have absolutely no background, experience or expertise in national security or intelligence, but her principal qualifications appear to be loyalty to Pulte and an embrace of absurd election-interference conspiracies.”
Pulte’s choice of Norton is also likely to increase concerns among Democrats that President Donald Trump intends to use the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to interfere in the midterm elections. Pulte, a loyalist with no intelligence experience, has used his current position as head of federal mortgage agencies to refer political rivals of the president for federal criminal prosecution.
The New York Times first reported Norton’s appointment.
The former senior intelligence official, who requested anonymity due to concerns of retaliation, told MS NOW the choice also “signals as clearly as could be that Pulte has been put at ODNI to misuse the awesome power of the U.S. intelligence community to interfere in the upcoming midterm elections.”
‘Horrifying’: Pulte’s choice for top spy aide stokes fears of Trump vote tampering
The hire worries Democrats and former intelligence officials that President Trump is assembling a team of loyalists to again make false election fraud claims.
www.ms.now
Perhaps even more than the $1B+ of taxpayer funded vanity projects trump has going in DC he is laser focused on giving R's an electoral advantage this fall. Not by enacting popular policies or working on the nation's priorities. But rather by various means of voter suppression. and he'd really like someone to finally find some evidence of the elusive voter fraud he's been asserting for years really does exist. Himes warned that, “Trump was explicit when he appointed Bill Pulte to a job he had no qualifications for that he had elections in mind.” Trump has said in interviews with the news media that he would like to see Pulte shrink the size of the ODNI and investigate election fraud.
He's given all manner of rationalizations for doing so. Everything from fear he will be impeached again (the D's will have a hard time narrowing down the potential articles of impeachment to under 10) to irritating congressional investigations (where to start?) to "the commies (Democratic Socialists) are coming, oh my!"
But this really comes down to time running out on his power to command the resources at the government's disposal to find some infinitesimally small impropriety he can blow way out of proportion. Something John Durham failed to do when he investigated the Obama admin for evidence of some evil perpetrated against Don.
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