This comes after stories showing that his claims to have tried terrorism cases were also inflated.

The office of DNI has existed only since 2005, and before Trump’s election had been filled by people with long careers of service in the military, the intelligence world or both. President George W. Bush appointed Mike McConnell, a Navy vice admiral who had been the director of the National Security Agency. President Barack Obama appointed James R. Clapper Jr., an Air Force lieutenant general who had run the Defense Intelligence Agency.

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But those claims of Ratcliffe’s work stoppin’ terrorists and ropin’ illegals were almost the entirety of his qualifications for the job, other than six months sitting on the House Intelligence Committee.

It’s good news that Ratcliffe’s nomination went down. But there’s a sobering undercurrent to what just happened. Ratcliffe largely crashed and burned because of that lack of qualifications and evidently not because of the actual reason Trump selected him, which is at least as bad.

As we all know, Trump chose Ratcliffe because Trump viewed him as being entirely qualified for the post — as Trump envisioned it. At former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s hearings, Ratcliffe spun out Trump’s biggest lies about the Russian attack on our election and efforts by law enforcement to get to the bottom of it.

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Ratcliffe downplayed Mueller’s finding that Trump engaged in extensive and likely criminal efforts to impede that investigation. He also fed the conspiracy theory that Democrats were the real colluders with Russia and that the investigation was illegitimate. Ratcliffe worked up great conviction while doing this — that is, he put on a great show, from Trump’s perspective — which surely impressed him greatly.

At stake was the basic question of whether Trump would be able to continue corrupting our institutions to serve his own interests. As DNI, Ratcliffe would have been able to continue propping up this alternate narrative of the Russia investigation — something that could potentially expose the next election to more foreign attacks on Trump’s behalf.

After all, the fact that outgoing director Daniel Coats kept warning about the seriousness of the threat to our democracy was a chief source of tension in his relationship with the White House.

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By contrast, Ratcliffe disputes the very finding that Russia wanted to help elect Trump. This, even though that’s what Mueller found and even though a Senate Intelligence Committee report just lent more support to the intelligence community’s conclusion along these lines, while also underscoring that there are even greater reasons for concern about the next round of sabotage.

So it was hard to imagine Ratcliffe taking it seriously if and when that sabotage began in earnest. And, with Attorney General William P. Barr busy investigating the investigators — that is, searching for evidence to support Trump’s narrative that Russian interference was no biggie and that the bigger crime was the investigation itself — Ratcliffe would have been well positioned as DNI to help with that.

The problem here is that none of these reasons are why Trump yanked the nomination. Indeed, just this week, Trump again repeated that the whole idea of Russian interference is a hoax:

However, the fact that this continues to be Trump’s view actually helps set the threshold for what Democrats should demand from the next nominee: not just that he actually be qualified for the post but that he unequivocally not subscribe to Trump’s Russia alt-narrative and takes the need to defend our political system seriously.

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“That John Ratcliffe was even nominated speaks to the deep disregard for America’s national security at the core of this rotten administration,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a big proponent of election security, said Friday.

One last thought: A number of Twitter wags suggested that Trump should nominate Rep. Will Hurd — the Texas congressman who just announced his retirement — for the post:

Everyone, of course, understands this to be clever trolling, precisely because Hurd — like Coats — took the Russian attack on our democracy seriously. Yes, Hurd echoes the standard GOP talking point that Mueller found “no collusion,” but Hurd also says that “Russia continues to erode our democracy” and that we must continue “to strengthen election security.”

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What’s morbidly ironic about this is that a different Republican president actually might have considered nominating someone like Hurd. But we all know that under Trump, this is just a big, knee-slapping joke.

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In the end, this whole affair underscores Trump’s contempt for the very idea that there are any government functions that should be above his personal needs.