Donald Trump’s Director of National Intelligence debacle just took an even uglier turn

| 7:40 pm EDT August 8, 2019
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As with all of Donald Trump ugly scandals, his DNI scandal has managed to get even uglier today. Last week Trump announced that he was ousting his Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, and replacing him with Republican Congressman John Ratcliffe. But even Republican Senators couldn’t take Ratcliffe seriously, so they publicly yet subtly told Trump to move on.

Even with Trump’s pick Ratcliffe off the table, Republican Senators – Richard Burr chief among them – decided to stick it to Trump further. They publicly acknowledged that Trump was legally required to name Deputy DNI Sue Gordon as Acting DNI until he could find a confirmable nominee. This directly screwed with Trump’s plan to stick some unnamed loyalist in there as Acting DNI. But now there’s a new twist.

After various media outlets reported that either Donald Trump or Mike Pence met with Sue Gordon today, Trump tweeted this evening that Gordon is now retiring, as of one week from today. Trump sad that a “new Acting Director of National Intelligence will be named shortly.” Minutes later he added that the Acting DNI would be retired Admiral Joseph Maguire, who is currently the Director of the National Counterterrorism Center. Coats vociferously praised Maguire when he was appointed last year, so it could be that the Senate is forcing Maguire on Trump, and that Maguire is on the up-and-up. We’ll see.

In any case, this just keeps getting uglier. It had already been clear for a long time that Dan Coats had no influence over Donald Trump’s bought-and-paid-for foreign policy positions, and Sue Gordon wouldn’t have had any influence over him either. But at this point the United States is about to have no Director of National Intelligence or Deputy Director of National Intelligence – which sums up the Trump regime to a tee.