From the Post:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... gest-lies/
"There’s a lot to scrutinize about John Ratcliffe’s big announcement about Iran and Russia, but an important piece of news about it is getting lost: Without doing so directly, President Trump’s own director of national intelligence actually debunked one of the president’s biggest lies about the election.
Much discussion of Ratcliffe’s remarks to the media has focused on his claim that Iran is sending fake threatening emails to voters — purportedly from the right-wing extremist Proud Boys — to help Trump. As many have noted, the idea that this benefits Trump makes little sense on its face.
But Ratcliffe also said something else in his Wednesday evening comments that is oddly getting overlooked: He indirectly but unequivocally confirmed that the claims that Trump has been making about voter fraud, particularly in vote-by-mail, are false.
In that way, this affair actually demonstrates just how low Trump has sunk in trying to corrupt the election: validating Trump’s efforts to undermine confidence in the integrity of the voting is a line that even Ratcliffe, who’s widely seen as a devoted Trump loyalist, won’t cross.
The centerpiece of Ratcliffe’s announcement was that Iran — and Russia, which was mysteriously downplayed — has obtained voter data enabling Iran to send emails to voters that were faked to seem like right-wing efforts to menace them into voting for Trump.
Ratcliff noted that this was “designed to intimidate voters, incite social unrest and damage President Trump.”
The idea is that these emails are supposed to associate Trump with right-wing efforts to intimidate voters, harming him politically. But as Democrats noted, too little is known about the scheme to conclude that this was the conscious aim.
But the other thing Ratcliffe said about Iran is really important. Here it is:
Iran is distributing other content to include a video that implies that individuals could cast fraudulent ballots, even from overseas. This video, and any claims about such allegedly fraudulent ballots, are not true.
You don’t say, DNI Ratcliffe. By the way, who else has been making such claims about fraudulent ballots?
Why, Trump has, of course. And so has his attorney general, William P. Barr. And so has the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr.
The wretched meaning of this is further underscored by the video that Iran has allegedly circulated. It’s not available now because Twitter suspended the account where it had been posted.
But The Post viewed the video:
The video, which was reviewed by The Washington Post, shows Trump making disparaging comments about mail-in voting, followed by a logo with the name of the Proud Boys. It then documents what was made to appear as a hack of voting data in an effort to produce a fraudulent ballot.
So, to be as clear as possible, this video circulated by Iran, which Ratcliffe has denounced for spreading false information about voter fraud, features Trump himself making such claims.
Indeed, claims that Ratcliffe here denounces as disinformation from a hostile foreign power — that balloting fraud is a serious problem, including from overseas, which necessarily means vote-by-mail — are ones that the president of the United States and his attorney general make on a regular basis.
These false assertions are absolutely central to Trump’s endgame in this election. He has insisted that because of mail-vote fraud, the election cannot render a legitimate outcome in which he loses. And he’s openly telegraphed that he’ll use this idea to try to invalidate untold numbers of ballots.
What’s more, Barr has echoed these falsehoods. Barr has repeatedly hyped bogus instances of voter fraud and has insisted that mail voting is susceptible to foreign counterfeiting of ballots.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump Jr. has stated as fact that “millions” of mail ballots will inevitably be faked as part of a scheme to steal the election from his father, and has even used this to mobilize Trump supporters for a sustained struggle over the results.
Yet now Trump’s own DNI has flatly stated that all this is nonsense.
I ran this by Joshua Geltzer, the senior counterterrorism director at the National Security Council from 2015 to 2017. He noted that Ratcliffe, perhaps without realizing it, has now badly complicated Trump’s ability to make this claim going forward.
“Ratcliffe himself just put this in a bucket of falsity, despite Trump being the one to say it all the time,” Geltzer told me.
Trump’s appearance in the video spread by Iran shows that “foreign actors don’t need to cook up disinformation,” Geltzer continued. “They just need to amplify the president of the United States.”
“Then when his own cabinet talks about foreign disinformation, they’re actually talking about things the president has said,” Geltzer noted.
On top of all this, Ratcliffe also confirmed that this disinformation about voter fraud is designed to “cause confusion, sow chaos and undermine your confidence in American democracy,” as he told reporters.
Trump says this stuff constantly. But now his own DNI has confirmed that it’s actively harmful to the national interest.
“He’s saying the circulation of precisely this sort of claim that Trump makes all the time is bad for American democracy and for the United States,” Geltzer concluded.
Trump will surely make these claims countless more times going forward, including at the final debate. Perhaps the moderator might consider asking Trump what he thinks about his own DNI’s assertion that they’re disinformation, and that they’re bad for our country."
