Neocon chicken-hawk (certainly chicken!) John Bolton has been paraded around the major media over the last 24 hours to play his role criticizing and attacking Trump’s latest cabinet picks of Matt Gaetz and Tulsi Gabbard. In an interview with NBC News, Bolton called Trump’s selection of Gaetz as Attorney General, “the worst nomination for a cabinet position in American history.” According to a report in Newsweek, when speaking to NewsNation, Bolton said: “I don’t think either she [Gabbard] or Matt Gaetz ought to have a confirmation hearing until they have both had full field FBI investigations.”
But Bolton is clearly the most worried about Gabbard. “Given the Russian propaganda that she has espoused over the past period of time, I think she’s a serious threat to our national security,” he told NewsNation. “With his announcement of Tulsi Gabbard to be the Director of National Intelligence, he’s sending a signal that we have lost our mind when it comes to collecting intelligence,” Bolton proclaimed.
Bolton specifically targetted Gabbard’s remarks after the Jan. 3, 2020 assassination in Baghdad of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani, in which she said she was “concerned about the illegal and unconstitutional act of war.” His pathological response was: “So that’s the kind of person that we’re going to put in charge of our overall intelligence community?” Concern over the Constitution and law is, in Bolton’s world, exactly what disqualifies a person from his vision of intelligence work.
The New York Times also seems to find common cause with Bolton. After lamenting that there is not in Trump’s cabinet “even a John Bolton, the former national security adviser who ended up clashing with Mr. Trump over making what he considered unwise agreements with America’s enemies,” they cite a Trump “biographer,” Timothy L. O’Brien, on the problem with Trump and Gabbard: “There are all sorts of things going on inside those agencies that we’re not going to be able to see, that are really important to the integrity and the smooth functioning of American life. And they’re going to be in there with matches, seeing what, what catches fire first.”
Evidently, Bolton and the New York Times have concerns over the amount of tinder in our intelligence community that has stacked up in recent years.
