President Trump didn’t hide his intentions for hiring a Republican lawmaker to replace Dan Coats as director of national intelligence while speaking to the press on Tuesday.
He said he nominated Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-TX) — who, among other things, thinks special counsel Robert Mueller’s team is linked to the Clinton Foundation — to “rein” in an intelligence community that he claims has “run amok” under Coats, an official who’s vociferously warned of Russia’s meddling efforts.
“I think that John Ratcliffe is going to do an incredible job if he gets approved, he’s gotta get approved, but I think he’ll do a great job, I hope he gets approved,” he told reporters Tuesday. “I think we need somebody like that, we need somebody strong that can really rein it in because, as I think you’ve all learned ,the intelligence agencies have run amok. They’ve run amok.”
Trump tends to undermine his own intelligence community when it comes to findings that Russia meddled in the 2016 election — and has even publicly accepted Russian President Vladimir Putin’s denials of interference — because he feels it delegitimizes his win.
Trump on Ratcliffe nomination: "We need somebody strong that can really rein it in because as I think you've all learned the intelligence agencies have run amok. They run amok." pic.twitter.com/qfs58oxVOj
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) July 30, 2019
