Since stepping down from his busy and consequential three-month stint as acting director of national intelligence, Richard Grenell has been engaged in a war of words with Democrats and their media allies on Twitter.
John Ratcliffe, a former federal prosecutor and Texas congressman, was sworn in on Tuesday as President Trump’s top intelligence adviser.
That same day, Politico posted a false story alleging that Grenell would be joining Trump’s reelection campaign in a “senior role.”
Grenell completely refuted the story after it was tweeted out by Politico fabulist “Fusion” Natasha Bertrand.
https://twitter.com/RichardGrenell/status/1265432597397676032?s=20
Brad Dayspring, the vice president of communications and marketing at Politico, defended the article, arguing Politico had “multiple high level [anonymous] sources,” even after Grenell said that it was “fake news.”
The longtime Democrat political operative asked Grenell to point out which “specific facts” the story got wrong.
“The entire story isn’t true,” Grenell tweeted back, calling Dayspring’s response “scary.” He added, “do you realize how ridiculous you sound?”
https://twitter.com/RichardGrenell/status/1265471853268795392?s=20
After being told the entire story was false, Dayspring insisted that Grenell go over with him “point by point” what he specifically believed to be untrue. Grenell refused to spend any more time refuting the article. “Delete the story, it’s false,” he tweeted.
https://twitter.com/RichardGrenell/status/1265482833147105280?s=20
Next Grenell took aim at former Obama official Samantha Power, who is infamous for using her position as ambassador to the UN to unmask hundreds of Americans (or allow someone to use her clearance to unmask hundreds of Americans) during the final months of Obama’s presidency. Power had the nerve to amplify Senator Marco Rubio’s cautionary tweet about President Trump “peddling” conspiracy theories.
“After spending years peddling a Russian collusion hoax, but under oath admitting you saw NOTHING, forgive us if we ignore your new warnings,” Grenell tweeted.
https://twitter.com/RichardGrenell/status/1265637169839910912?s=20
Rep. Swalwell (D-Calif.) has been taunting Grenell for over a week about releasing the transcripts of Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn’s December 2016 telephone calls with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
Grenell explained last week that the Intelligence Community has not been been able to declassify all of the material because it wasn’t their product. “But I already started the declassification for the few we received. They should be released in full, though. The public deserves to see it,” he said.
“Well, you’re no longer director and the Flynn tapes never came,” Swalwell tweeted on Thursday, knowing full well why the transcripts have not been released. “ All you have to show for your work is the dirt on your boots from shoveling and burying evidence for @realDonaldTrump. #ShowUsTheTape”
Tick tock. “Those are coming.” Well, you’re no longer director and the Flynn tapes never came. All you have to show for your work is the dirt on your boots from shoveling and burying evidence for @realDonaldTrump. #ShowUsTheTape https://t.co/ldYLn9LcQl
— Rep. Eric Swalwell (@RepSwalwell) May 28, 2020
Grenell assured Swalwell—again—that the transcripts are coming, and reminded him about how he spread Russian propaganda on TV for years.
https://twitter.com/RichardGrenell/status/1266005231105703937?s=20
The Democrat continued his disinformation campaign, repeating the liberal trope that Trump “spread Russian propaganda” by asking Putin to hack into Hillary Clinton’s emails. In reality, Trump had joked in 2016 that if Putin had Clinton’s 33,000 missing emails, he should release them.
“You spent tens of millions of taxpayer dollars weaponizing the US government & telling Americans there was massive collusion. Your own committee interviewed more than 50 people under oath & they all said the same thing: they know of no collusion. But on TV you said the opposite,” Grenell wrote in response to the Dem. lawmaker.
https://twitter.com/RichardGrenell/status/1266028679370616834?s=20
“You said the opposite knowing what the 50 people said under oath – and yet for years you didn’t want their transcripts to be made public. Transparency is required! Americans deserve to see how this hoax developed and who silenced those who raised doubts early on,” he added.
Swalwell then pretended that because the Russia investigation was led by Republicans, Democrats didn’t have a chance to ask any questions. Grenell corrected him on that, noting that the Flynn phone call transcripts “were the only thing you didn’t leak to the DC media.”
https://twitter.com/RichardGrenell/status/1266034697488019462?s=20
https://twitter.com/RichardGrenell/status/1266042383986241536?s=20
Daniel Goldman, a lawyer for Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee during the impeachment hoax, piped in, accusing Grenell of assuming “the same kind of deceptive and deficient logic” the new DNI, former Texas Rep. John Ratcliffe used during impeachment. “If any individual *fact* witness does not or cannot assert a *legal* conclusion, that does not mean that that legal conclusion cannot be found,” he said.
“I’m being deceptive?!” Grenell tweeted back. “I’m for transparency. You DC types hide the details from the American people and then go on TV and say something they can’t check. It’s the DC way. And it usually works – until Americans see the details (i.e. the hidden transcripts).”
When Swalwell needled Grenell for refusing to brief his treacherous committee, the former DNI responded, “it’s time we brief the American people. We’re done with Washington manipulations. Transparency is needed.”
https://twitter.com/RichardGrenell/status/1266060766421168130?s=20
Like a broken record, Swalwell continued to assail Grenell for failing to release the Flynn transcripts, knowing that he didn’t have all of them in his possession.
https://twitter.com/RichardGrenell/status/1266076836561399816?s=20
https://twitter.com/RichardGrenell/status/1266080672260722693?s=20
Thursday afternoon, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany told reporters that the DOJ is indeed reviewing another trove of documents for public release that Grenell had declassified. The former DNI retweeted that information, cc’ing Swalwell.
https://twitter.com/RichardGrenell/status/1266077476259860480?s=20
In his first interview since he left office, Grenell also took some parting shots at the DC swamp, especially the Democrat leakers on the House Intelligence Committee.
https://twitter.com/RichardGrenell/status/1265982904775163906?s=20
“I have been dealing with career intelligence officials who have been literally saying they do not want to brief the Hill because they don’t want their careers to be ruined,” Grenell told conservative talk radio host Mark Levin on Wednesday. “We’ve had several people refuse to go to the Hill and brief because the atmosphere is so toxic that what they have to say is manipulated, and leaked, and cherry-picked.”
As a result, he said, members of the Intel Community had to find ways to prevent Democrats on the intelligence committees from manipulating their information.
“After hearing from the career intelligence officials being very nervous about briefing the Hill, we put forward an unclassified fact sheet that we would leave behind with the members of Congress that listed what we had just said, knowing full well that that fact sheet would be leaked to the media,” Grenell explained. “But it was important to the Intelligence Community officials to write it down and so no one could manipulate their words.”
He noted that intelligence gathering is not an exact science, saying sometimes the Intelligence Community underestimates intelligence and other times they overestimate, “but what we expect from intelligence officials are honest assessments.”
“I’m very concerned about the Hill and the leaks that are coming out of the Hill just as much as I’m concerned about the few leaks that keep coming out of the Intel Community.”
Grenell told Levin that certain members of Congress would seek information in letters and then leak those letters to the press before they even got to him.
“It’s a clear message that this is about grandstanding. That this is not about oversight and trying to get to the bottom of information,” he said.
Grenell noted that the DC Swamp has a tendency to go after people who are considered to be “outsiders.”
“Look [at] what they did when I came in and was appointed. They immediately said this is an outsider who has no experience. And I heard that over and over, Mark, from most every news outlet. No experience, no experience. That’s not true. I have different experiences. I’ve been a consumer of intelligence since 2001, longer than a lot of the people who are in charge of overseeing intelligence from Congress. But that didn’t matter to them because I didn’t grow up in the system,” he said.
“An outsider coming in with fresh eyes is like the enemy because you’re going to look at things differently,” Grenell added.
He also said that he believes the Obama White House was fully aware of the FBI’s corrupt Crossfire Hurricane investigation into Russian collusion with President Trump’s 2016 campaign, telling Levin, “there is no possible way that it wasn’t known inside the White House and that multiple layers of people knew about this.”