Former DNI John Radcliffe was on tucker tonight and he brought up an interesting point. He said that at the time of the alleged FBI “warning,” Radcliffe had been working with FBI leadership and they were all on board that the laptop was not Russian dissing information. And if you go back you’ll see that Radcliffe had issued a statement to that effect a few days after the New York Post story had broken, and a couple days after that the FBI issued a statement saying they had nothing to add to what Radcliffe had said. So the “warning” Zuckerberg received must have came from the lower ranks of the fbi, and fbi leadership may not have even been aware of it.
A few selections from Ratcliffe’s Wikipedia page, a helpful reminder of who Ratcliffe is and what he stands for and how those who are skeptical about what Ratcliffe says about national security matters got there:
“during his tenure as DNI, Ratcliffe was regarded as using the DNI to score political points for Trump. Ratcliffe made public assertions that contradicted the intelligence community's own assessments, and sidelined career officials in the intelligence community….
Ratcliffe has little experience in national security or national intelligence and is reported to have demonstrated little engagement on the matters as a congressman. Trump's intent to nominate Ratcliffe became controversial when he was found to have misrepresented his role in prosecuting terrorism and immigration cases….
Ratcliffe is well known for criticizing the FBI and the special counsel investigation as being biased against Trump. Ratcliffe has also alleged that Russian interference may have benefited Trump's 2016 rival candidate Hillary Clinton more than it benefited Trump. American intelligence agencies, the Senate Intelligence Committee and Robert Mueller have maintained that Russia interfered to help Trump. A week before Trump's announcement, Ratcliffe had argued that the special counsel investigation put Trump "below the law" because it declined to exonerate Trump. Later, Ratcliffe claimed on Fox News that the
special counsel investigation's report was not written by special counsel
Robert Mueller, but by "Hillary Clinton’s de facto legal team".…
Thirty-five days before the November 2020 election, Ratcliffe declassifed 2016 Russian disinformation that asserted Hillary Clinton had personally approved a scheme to associate Trump with Vladimir Putin and Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee. Ratcliffe provided the disinformation to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman
Lindsey Graham, who publicly released it. The allegation had been previously rejected as baseless by the Republican-controlled
Senate Intelligence Committee. Ratcliffe acknowledged in a letter to Graham that the intelligence community "does not know the accuracy of this allegation or the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect exaggeration or fabrication." The intelligence community opposed the release of the information. According to the New York Times, Ratcliffe's disclosure "appeared to be a bid to help Mr. Trump politically."
Ratcliffe diverged from remarks prepared by the intelligence community regarding attempted election interference by Iran in the 2020 election. Ratcliffe said that the election interference was intended to "damage President Trump."
. Apologies for getting that wrong. Your voting history is almost identical to mine, except I voted for Obama twice and Trump instead of Clinton (big regret there). I have voted for the winner in every election in my life. 5 Democrats and 4 Republicans.
