Pierce: The Director of National Intelligence Was Between the Jaws of a Nutcracker
The Director of National Intelligence Was Between the Jaws of a Nutcracker
Joseph Maguire never had a chance, and the Trump administration* made sure of it. You buy a ticket to Bedlam, you get the whole tour.
BY CHARLES P. PIERCE
SEP 26, 2019
WASHINGTON — On Thursday, in a congressional hearing room, we saw a man caught in a nutcracker. It is true that he volunteered to walk into the nutcracker after two other people left it. It is also true that he twisted and turned, and fudged fantabulously (as Rep. Jim Hines put it) trying to survive between the jaws of the nutcracker. But, at the end of it, the nutcracker broke him as it has broken so many other people who decided to bathe in this poisoned spring of a presidency*. Joseph Maguire, former Navy SEAL, career Navy man from a family full of them, and now the Director of National Intelligence, found his previous life and career in tiny chunks all around his feet....
Maguire never had a chance. Shortly before the hearing, the committee released both the official complaint filed by the mysterious whistleblower regarding the administration*'s attempt to blackjack the embattled government of Ukraine into helping ratfck the president* a second term. These two documents so fundamentally demolished the threadbare remnants of the administration*'s shabby alibis as to be self-evident. Maguire's choices were either to ignore the obvious criminality that he knows about as well as anyone in government outside of the administration*, or to play dumb and couch his responses in various forms of privilege, not all of which actually exist. To nobody's surprise, Maguire did both. He said he trusted in the good faith of both the whistleblower and the Intelligence Community's inspector general, Michael Atkinson. He also refused even to say whether or not he had ever spoken to the president* on this matter, citing executive privilege—which, one supposes, is a backdoor way of saying that he had....
The Republicans on the committee didn't quite know what to do with Maguire, either. They wavered between praising him for his service, taking potshots at committee chairman Adam Schiff, and weaving their Sean Hannity Starter Kit conspiracies throughout the official record. (Congressman Devin Nunes, the former White House lawn ornament now d/b/a the ranking minority member of the committee, accused Democrats of seeking out nude pictures of the president*, which was a new one on a lot of people, most of whom felt their stomachs turn at the very concept.) Eventually, the Republicans simply gave up questioning and left the room entirely, although Nunes came back at the end to belch some talking points because what the hell else does he have to do these days...besides suing internet cows, of course....
"As [Maguire] said, this process was unusual," said Rep. Joaquin Castro, Democrat of Texas. "It's different from anything that's happened in the past. It was extraordinary that the inspector general's determination of 'Urgent Request' was overruled. If you look at the complaint, it says that a lot of people in the White House actually knew about the president's abuse of power, and there were people who tried to cover it up by putting this phone conversation into a different system, so that's very unusual. We also need to know if there were other things that were covered up besides this phone conversation. What about conversations with other foreign leaders, like Vladimir Putin?"
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a29251747/joseph-maguire-testify-congress-ukraine-whistleblower/?utm_campaign=socialflowTWESQ&src=socialflowTW&utm_medium=social-media&utm_source=twitter
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