Well, we’ve never had a Director of National Intelligence who once gloated about his ability to get me fired from this job, so I guess that’s one more thing on the bucket list to check off. From The New York Times:

By choosing Mr. Grenell, who has little experience in intelligence or in running a large bureaucracy, the president signaled that he wants a trusted, aggressive leader atop an intelligence community that he has long viewed with suspicion and at times gone to war against.

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As Steve Benen points out, Grenell’s primary occupation prior to being a terrible ambassador to Germany was as an Internet pest. Trump sent him to Germany, where he promptly got sideways with the government there by playing footsie with what are described as “far-right elements.” Perhaps it eluded Ambassador Grenell during his extensive diplomatic training on Twitter, but the Germans are rather touchy about stuff like that. Adding more absurdity to an already preposterous situation, it is apparently the intention of the administration* to have Grenell be a terrible ambassador to Germany and a terrible DNI at the same time.



The options to avoid this onrushing calamity are limited. Grenell is yet another “acting” official, so the administration* doesn’t have to put Mitch McConnell through the inconvenience of confirming him to the latest job for which Grenell is totally unqualified. To me, the only option is to have the House of Representatives somehow simply refuse to fund the position of DNI until a permanent director is named and confirmed. That’s a pretty high-stakes game of chicken, but really, how long do we all have to pretend this is all normal?

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