
Before Tulsi Gabbard was confirmed as the least qualified director of national intelligence in human history, there were rumblings around the Senate that bless her heart, the One Known As Russia’s Girlfriend maaaaaaaay not have the foggiest fucking idea what “director of national intelligence” is supposed to do in the course of their duties. (DNI coordinates all the other intel agencies. It’s a job for an intelligence expert. Tulsi Gabbard is, um, not that.)
But she’s figured out one thing she likes to do, and that is fire actual intelligence experts who come to conclusions that offend the racist, hallucinatory pigfuck sensibilities of Dear Leader. How can he do his very important job of letting Middle Eastern petrostates bribe him with old planes they don’t want when he can’t rely on his intelligence services to confirm whatever bigoted halfwit shit he believes, or is trying to lie to the American people about?
The headlines in NBC News and other sources are about Gabbard firing two top intel officials who refused to go along with the regime’s likely entirely made-up insistence that the Tren de Aragua gang is an arm of the Venezuelan government. Trump needs to assert that’s true, because if TdA isn’t part of or sponsored by the Venezuelan government, then all his claims about Venezuelan migrants being part of a state-sponsored foreign terrorist invasion get even facially stupider than they already were. And if that happens, then even fewer judges might sign off on Trump using the Alien Enemies Act to kidnap and send people to concentration camps in third locations without due process, because of how the AEA is supposed to be for when we are actually at war, and not just when the racist cow in the Oval Office imagines we are at war because he’s terrified of slightly darker-skinned people who speak Spanish.
(The current tally on that count is “This One Idiot Trump Judge In Pennsylvania.”)
So it didn’t help the eternally bullshitting Trump administration when the intelligence community’s own assessment said TdA wasn’t operating under the direction of the Venezuelan government. In a world where anybody in the Trump administration possessed an ounce of integrity, that might have slowed them down. The whole point of intelligence is that you want it to be correct, eh? (Make all your jokes about yellowcake uranium in Niger right here!)
Instead Tulsi was like fuck it, the people who made that report are fired. She isn’t here to do good work. She’s here to tell President “I Invented Groceries” whatever he wants to hear. A, because he’s a tyrant, B, because he’s monumentally stupid and his brain stopped functioning in the late 1980s and he can’t process new information.
Gabbard dismissed Michael Collins, the acting chair of the National Intelligence Council, and council vice chair Maria Langan-Riekhof, both career officials with decades of experience in intelligence analysis, two officials said.
“She dismissed these individuals because they were unable to provide unbiased intelligence,” one of the officials said, without elaborating.
Gabbard’s deputy chief of staff, Alexa Henning, said in a social media post that they were dismissed “because they politicized intelligence.”
A spokesperson for Gabbard, Olivia Coleman, said in an email: “The Director is working alongside President Trump to end the weaponization and politicization of the Intelligence Community.”
Eat shit, fascist liars #1, 2 and 3.
As NBC News explains, the assessment from last month matched the conclusions of everybody except Kash Patel’s curious and thoughtful #BeBest FBI, and it said no, Tren de Aragua wasn’t operating as an arm of Nicholas Maduro’s government, nor as a leg or a right nut.
NBC News also notes that these two fired officials were also specifically named and shamed online by Laura Loomer, who is apparently the real DNI. Sorry, Tulsi Gabbard! We didn’t think you came up with this idea on your own in the first place, don’t worry.
Former CIA Director John Brennan:
“It’s clearly a signal to tell analysts throughout the intelligence community: ‘you tell the truth, you provide objective analysis, as you’re supposed to be doing, you are running the risk of getting fired,’” Brennan told MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace.
He added that Collins and Langan-Riekhof “are two of the most experienced, accomplished, and talented analysts in the entire U.S. intelligence community” who have worked for successive presidents from both parties since the 1990s.
Here’s a clip from yesterday’s Nicolle Wallace:
In other Gabbard news, the New York Times reports she’s trying to consolidate her control over the President’s Daily Brief. We’re sure there’s nothing to worry about there.
This is fascism. It’s breathtakingly, squirrel-fucking-ly stupid fascism, but it is fascism.
OPEN THREAD.
[NBC News]
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