President Donald Trump is expected to install Richard Grenell, his current Ambassador to Germany, as his next Acting Director of National Intelligence, according to The New York Times. Grenell is known as a bombastic Trump loyalist who has not been well received in Berlin.
The DNI is a Cabinet-level official who sits at the very top of the entire Intelligence Community, serving as the head of the 17 federal agencies that comprise it. They also serve as the President’s chief advisor on national security, and produce the top-secret President’s Daily Brief (PDB).
Federal law states quite clearly, “Any individual nominated for appointment as Director of National Intelligence shall have extensive national security expertise.”
He does not have that experience. He is a Fox News personality and twitter troll who inexplicably got confirmed to be the Ambassador to Germany and everybody just shrugged as they do when Trump does something ridiculous.
However, Trump is just appointing him to be”acting” which I guess means none of the rules apply. I’m just surprised he didn’t put Jared “I don’t qualify for a security clearance” Kushner in that job too.
Obviously, Grenell is being brought in to root out Deep State actors who have not pledged personal fealty to Dear Leader. I can’t think another reason you’d hire this particular person for that particular job:
Here’s one dispatch from his early days in Germany:
According to a recent Breitbart article, Grenell is a “big fan” of Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz, the boyish face of the his country’s far right government notable for banning headscarves for kids and otherwise making immigrants feel deeply, sometimes dangerously unwanted. Grenell appears to see Kurz as a representative for the “conservatives around Europe” that he, the ambassador, would like to “empower.”
That sounded to a lot of people like Grenell playing advance man for a Bannonesque populist assault on the European political order. So now Berlin would like Grenell to explain what exactly he was talking about. “We asked the U.S. side for clarification,” a foreign ministry spokesperson said Monday morning. The Daily Beast did the same thing. A U.S. embassy spokesperson told us “the quotes are genuine“ and Grenell “stands by the interview.”
Indeed, the medium was part of the message. Breitbart used to be Steve Bannon’s baby, and the interview was published as the former Trump campaign manager and advisor has been touring the Continent touting his ideas for destroying the European Union. Chris Tomlinson, the young reporter who interviewed Grenell, is a self-described “beer nerd” whose most consistent beat appears to be cheering for the the selfie-stick-clutching right-wing extremists who once wanted to block rescue missions on the Mediterranean and more recently have taken to patrolling the Alps to hunt down refugees.
It is bad form for a diplomat to act like a spokesperson for any foreign political movement. In the U.S. Nicholas Burns, who was under secretary of state for political affairs in the George W. Bush administration, pointed out the “cardinal rule of diplomacy” that ambassadors “must not interfere in the domestic politics of the countries to which they are accredited.” In Germany, the former leader of the Social Democrats promptly compared Grenell to a “right-wing extremist colonial officer.”
At a time when foreign policy analysts are worried that misunderstandings will amplify tensions between the U.S. and Germany, the new U.S. ambassador isn’t just doing Breitbart interviews—he also tweets about twice as much as President Donald J. Trump, which is saying something.
On his first day at work in Berlin he tweeted that, in light of President Trump sabotaging the Iran Nuclear Deal, “Germans doing business in Iran should wind down operations immediately.” The Germans’ angry responses on Twitter mounted into the thousands.ADVERTISING
One reason Grenell’s confirmation in the Senate was held up for almost a year reportedly was concern among Democrats about his caustic and sometimes sexist social media habits. When he was the spokeman for Republican candidate Mitt Romney in the 2012 elections, Grenell tried to deleted a raft of nasty tweets. “Hillary [Clinton] is starting to look like Madeleine Albright,” he declared in one post, and noted in another that Michelle Obama, who likes sports, supposedly “was sweating on the East Room Carpet.”
After the Breitbart interview was published, the tweeting continued. Many critics suggested Grenell wants to “empower” figures like Alexander Gauland, the co-leader of the far right Alternative für Deutschland party. “Absurd, I condemn these comments completely,“ Grenell tweeted, even though the 77-year-old Gauland loves to quote Edmund Burke and mainstream German media outlets have sometimes described him as a “clever“ or “old-fashioned“ conservative.
Probably Grenell realized the timing for a Gauland endorsement would look really very bad just now. Over the weekend, Gauland told a room full of fans from his party’s youth wing that Adolf Hitler, who brought about the death of at least 50 million people, is “just bird shit in more than 1,000 years of successful German history.“
Trump is obviously giving this particular unqualified, Nazi-curious, assassin access to all of America’s most closely held secrets for a reason. And it’s not a good one.