Trump Picks Fool Who Blew Up US-German Relations to Head US Intelligence Agencies

Absurdly Grenell gets to also stay on as Ambassador to Berlin

A tone-deaf hawk

Related:


Earlier tonight, the president named the U.S. ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, as the acting Director of National Intelligence (DNI):

President Donald Trump on Wednesday announced that Richard Grenell, the U.S. ambassador to Germany, will become acting director of national intelligence, a move that puts a staunch Trump ally in charge of the nation’s 17 spy agencies, which the president has only tepidly embraced.

Grenell has absolutely no relevant experience or expertise that would qualify him for this position, but of course Trump chose him because he is a reliable yes-man and one of the president’s most aggressive attack dogs.

The purpose of naming Grenell to serve in this role is to make sure that the intelligence Trump hears will always be to his liking and will reinforce his own assumptions, and it is part of his ongoing hostility toward career professionals in the government. Grenell has no business serving in this position, as anyone can see:

One source close to Trump told CNN they were surprised by the pick, noting Grenell has zero intelligence-related experience.

And another Trump adviser described Grenell as “out of his league” for the acting DNI job, adding that some in the administration are “embarrassed by his behavior.” Previous holders of the DNI job have served in the intelligence community, the US Senate and senior levels of the military. Grenell, on the other hand, does not boast a resume with similar credentials despite his stint as the US ambassador to Germany.

“Everybody came into (the DNI job) with a relevant understanding, of which this guy has none,” said Bob Litt, former ODNI general counsel, who called the move “extremely dangerous.”

Besides being unqualified for the job, Grenell is also a fervent hawk, especially on Iran, and it is very likely that he will take advantage of being Director of National Intelligence to feed flawed and distorted intelligence analysis to a gullible president.

It is telling that Trump is not nominating him for the position because that would expose Grenell and Trump to the scrutiny of a Senate confirmation process. The president prefers having so many officials serving in an acting capacity because it makes it harder for Congress to hold the administration accountable, and in this case it lets him install one of his favorites in a confirmable position. The president wants a lackey as DNI, and with Grenell he has found an eager one:

But it does not appear that Trump is looking for someone with deep intelligence experience in the role — a former senior White House official described Trump’s decision as “filling the gaps” following the impeachment acquittal, sensing disloyalty in Maguire, and filling that position with somebody he sees as sufficiently loyal. Trump is “looking for a ‘political’ who will have his back,” the former official said.

Absurdly, Grenell will reportedly continue in his position as ambassador to Germany:

Mr. Grenell is expected to begin his new job on Thursday. He is also expected to keep his current ambassadorship simultaneous with the new role, one administration official said.

Grenell has been a terrible ambassador, and he has made U.S.-German relations much worse during his time there. The only good thing that might have come from promoting Grenell to the DNI position is that he would no longer be causing so much damage to the U.S.-German relationship, but it appears that this won’t happen, either.

Source: The American Conservative

31 Comments
  1. Down to Earth Thinking says

    So Grennelle shows Amgela for what she is and her crew of morons and that is a ntgative ? HA Ha HA

  2. cechas vodobenikov says

    another amerikan gomik w no intelligence

  3. Robert Mcconnell says

    The fuckwit in chief in action…
    https://twitter.com/i/status/1231326273894526976

  4. Mark says

    Full circle, from the alleged closet homosexual J. Edgar Hoover to the flaming banner-carrier for the Gay Movement Richard Grenell. And he won’t even have to use his new position to ferret out any material the intelligence agencies might have on his same-sex liaisons – not unless he wants to use them in a book; homosexuality is a plus now, and it lends one a certain savoir-faire and cosmopolitan with-it.

    What you will get from a Richard-Grenell-managed intelligence conglomerate will be non-stop Russian conspiracies. I’m not sure why some people continue to portray Trump as a reluctant participant in scurrilous disclosures that hurt his hopes of forming common cause with Putin and Russia, he really does want to, but his own conservative hawks keep putting stumbling-blocks in his way. Let’s just dispense with that canard right now. Trump has no loyalties to anything but power, possibly the only high remaining to a lifelong rich man who can have anything that is for sale. Whenever his avowed warm feelings for Russia butt up against a new manufactured scandal – such as the utterly ridiculous charges that Russia is ‘helping Bernie because it wants another Trump presidency’ – Trump is happy to throw them under the bus and stipulate that America’s ridiculous ‘elections’ are protected six ways from Sunday with safeguards against nefarious Russian meddling. ‘Russian meddling’ is good for Trump – he can either acknowledge or reject it, whatever suits his purpose dependent on the occasion, just as he has taken a gullible public from where it never occurred at all, what a ridiculous idea, to where it occurred all over the place but he was never part of it in any context.

    Not only does a blatantly-political appointment like this hasten the collapse of The American Dream – if ever there really was such a thing – it actually makes onlookers eager for it. The United States, to use a popular cliche, has become a caricature of itself.

  5. Al Carbone says

    no wonder this degenerate POS loves pissrael so much being it is the h omo capital of the world. also ho mos are savage killers being they are the https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/1fbf8b26050dc8b03f65bfb270336c5be3dbd498eaa846046493cbaf441ae108.png most serial killers

  6. JustPassingThrough says

    Richard Grenell, as the acting Director of National Intelligence (DNI):

    lol, RG is a perfect example of the murikan “national intelligence.”
    …and it’s not an act.
    dumber than dirt.

    1. CHUCKMAN says

      He’s not dumb,

      Indeed, he’s quite bright.

      Just mean and arrogant in the extreme.

      1. Robert Mcconnell says

        No, he’s really really dumb.

      2. JustPassingThrough says

        mean and arrogant are part of my definition of dumb.

        being mean and arrogant is not a measure of intelligence except in the murikan lexicon.

  7. CHUCKMAN says

    Well, apparently, Grenell’s real task is just quickly taking a meat ax to some of the agencies, and he may only keep his title for a matter of weeks.

    He’s enough of a bastard for the job, for sure.

    From CNN:

    “Richard Grenell, the newly installed acting director of American spy agencies and loyalist to President Donald Trump, began his temporary tenure by moving aggressively to put his stamp on the intelligence community that Trump has repeatedly attacked.

    “Grenell ousted a veteran intelligence officer on Friday who served as the number two at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, according to The New York Times, and on Thursday he brought on board a former staffer of Rep. Devin Nunes, a California Republican who’s a staunch Trump ally.

    “He also asked to see the intelligence behind the classified briefing last week where lawmakers were told Russia was interfering in the 2020 election to aid Trump, the Times reported.”

  8. tapatio says

    Grenell must serve dual roles because Donald Trump’s standards for the raw sewage, with which he replaces the ‘swamp’, are so malodorous that only the most vile filth can qualify under Zio-Nazi-MuriKan guidelines.

    1. CHUCKMAN says

      I think the dual roles just relates to how short a time he will serve.

      His task really does seem to be “the Night of the Long Knives” for intelligence professionals Trump is furious with.

      1. tapatio says

        I’m sure you are correct. That insult to Trump popped into my little mind when I read about the dual role situation. I needed Grenell as a vehicle for that comment.

  9. CHUCKMAN says

    I read before of the impact Richard Grenell, in his role as American Ambassador, has had in Germany, and it has been truly the opposite of what diplomacy is supposed to accomplish.

    I agree with the author’s assessment. Grenell offers a complete lack of expertise in intelligence, but he offers dogged loyalty and readiness to please, as with views and information never contradicting, only reconfirming, Trump’s own. That is always one of hazards of “Big Intelligence” – as when the CIA during the Cold War, over and over, produced annual assessments of the USSR that were wildly out of line with reality – their aim being to juice up their budgets. But in this case, it seems a guaranteed outcome.

    Considering all the hotspots Trump has created in the world, how easy it would be for this kind of man to deliberately feed him dangerously slanted intelligence about any of them.

    I think particularly of Iran, the focus of so many unwarranted, irrational American hatreds – I think far more so than North Korea, a genuine renegade nuclear power – and a country we know that Israel’s Netanyahu would just relish seeing attacked. He has in the past, several times, manufactured various kinds of “evidence” that fortunately no one believed.

    After all, in one of Trump’s insane missile attacks on Syria, over a clearly faked poison gas event, it was reported at the time that it was Ivanka tearfully pleading with him about injured children that propelled him to act without any evidence.

    As we all know from observation, Ivanka is pretty much what old Trump associate, Steve Bannon, once said she was, “dumb as a brick.” Yet she has a deep mutual-admiration relationship with her father, much as this man will.

    Maybe one of the qualities Trump looks for in major appointments is just sheer unlikability.

    It is a feature of his every major appointment, except for former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who was doomed from his first day on the job because he liked facts and was ready to disagree when he didn’t see any.

    Being a truly dislikable man himself, he is comfortable with others of the same kind.

    Almost something resembling a monster in a fairy tale seeking the company of other monsters in the dark forest.

    In the end, you just have to wonder what Trump thinks he is doing with all of his “work” as President.

    He is piling up an amazing record of failures and half-done stunts and doing things that were better not done. He has to be the most unsuitable man ever for the role of a world leader.

    All of it is destructive, his every act towards friends and foes. Even in the case of Israel, which he rewards like a Mafia Don recognizing a loyal soldier, he builds something that cannot have a stable future because it ignores so many interests. He is reviled from China and across most of the Middle East over to huge parts of Latin America. And while he likely believes he is making America a better place, he is doing quite the opposite, pushing the world’s leaders to speed the day of a new set of international relationships, while contributing to the instability of a world already under grave economic stress.

    1. michael houston says

      “damn the torpedoes full speed ahead”……

    2. XRGRSF says

      Yes, but Trump will be reelected because Trump is America. After Trump the darkness will descend, and the future will fade to black, and brown.

      1. Robert Mcconnell says

        Hopefully it’ll all be over in a flash.

    3. Down to Earth Thinking says

      Lot of words to say nothing at all intelligent or of any report at all !

    4. Vera Gottlieb says

      We should remember what blind obedience to Hitler did…

      1. Down to Earth Thinking says

        And Obama as well Hey ? Trump is neither in spades, quite the opposite

      2. Robert Mcconnell says

        I do not think any of us actually know anything about Hitler. We only know what we have been told. I have no personal experience of Adolf, do you?

        1. Vera Gottlieb says

          If you care to invest some time…there is plenty of information about Germany and the Nazi years. Present-day Germany is trying to atone for Hitler’s crimes.

          1. Robert Mcconnell says

            The information you refer to is subject to some doubt, personally I doubt the accepted renditions of history

            1. Vera Gottlieb says

              I have the feeling you don’t want to know…Your choice.

            2. Ulricht says

              I copied this from someone who writes better than I, it is relevant to what we think we “know”…

              …it is all well and fun to comfortably sit in our chairs and criticize those who have been wrong in their past, but fundamentally this is both logically wrong and morally hypocritical. The truth is that history, ALL history, very much including our recent history, is chock full with myths, generalizations, simplifications, rumors and, most of all, lies. We all know about 9/11, but that is hardly a unique example. Does anybody remember the “Timisoara massacre” or, even better, the “Srebrenica genocide”? Speaking of Srebrenica, how about the no less fake “massacres” in Markale or Racak? How about Colonel Gaddafi giving Viagra to his men to rape Libyan women? Or this innocent young nurse from Kuwait who reported about the Iraqis tossing babies out of incubators?

              These were all lies.

              And then, there are the much more serious cases, including the historical truth about the so-called “Holocaust”. Or, who carries the responsibility for starting WWII? How about the Nuremberg Trials which some hailed as a huge victory for civilized mankind, while many others called it a “kangaroo court” of victors. What about the Tribunal on the Former Yugoslavia? Do you feel that this was a superb example of justice, or a crude Serbian-nation bashing PR operation?

            3. Vera Gottlieb says

              We see what we want to see. We hear what we want to hear. Now the newest “fad”…changing history because we don’t like certain episodes or better yet, the unpleasant parts are just buried. You mention Yugoslavia…well, thank Clinton for starting this mess. The US meddling all over the world…

  10. pasha says

    Trump’s intention is clear. When the three-letters next crawl out of the sewer croaking “the Russians did it”, Grenell will just say “bollocks” and refuse to pass the “intelligence” on.

  11. XRGRSF says

    Trump has picked who the international banking cartel told Trump to pick. The Orange Shabos Goy is just following orders.

  12. Vera Gottlieb says

    Ship of fools???

    1. Robert Mcconnell says

      Absolutely! Crowd on all sails, there’s a reef dead ahead.

    2. tapatio says

      Sewage barge.

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