Former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe on Sunday called out the White House’s lack of support for a “mismanaged” Asia trip by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.
In an interview on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures,” Ratcliffe insisted the trip is necessary.
“She does need to go for the sake of our national security so that the American people see that the Chinese Communist Party is not the one dictating American foreign policy, that it is the American government doing that,” he said.
He remarked about the Biden administration publicly talking about it ahead of time “and then not backing up Nancy Pelosi with the media or on the call with President Xi Jinping.”
“I think we've come to expect President [Joe] Biden… his weakness comes through. We didn't have high expectations for that call” with Xi, he said. “But very clearly, [Biden] did not back up the Speaker's right to go to Taiwan and as a result President Xi is acting on that weakness.”
“The Pentagon now in response to the mismanaged Pelosi travel plans, the Pentagon has to be prepared,” Ratcliffe said. “They have to move either carriers or fighters into place in the event that the Chinese would follow through on some of the rhetoric that's been out there about confronting a Pelosi-led congressional delegation plane. All of this is unnecessary.”
According to Ratcliffe, China is talking about a move on Taiwan in the next 18 months and it’s by calculation that it’s on Biden’s watch.
“We had this debacle in Afghanistan… They did not deter Vladimir Putin in Ukraine, and now we've got this unprecedented circumstance of China literally talking about an invasion of Taiwan through our intelligence community sources,” he said. “Any one of these … individual events would have been historic and noteworthy. The fact that all three of these things are happening during the Biden administration really speaks to what a disaster he has been as a foreign policy president.”
Ratcliffe also took aim at the FBI for allegedly trying to influence the 2020.
“FBI agents were attempting to influence the outcome of the 2020 election by suppressing derogatory information about Hunter Biden and potentially Joe Biden,” he charged.
“This is more than just about a two-tiered system of justice or about FBI agents being able to lie and get away with it when the American people don’t,” he added. “People need to understand that it is the FBI that is the primary domestic authority for investigating and leading to the prosecution of election influence and election interference. It's really a problem when the agency that is responsible for investigating those things is engaged in those things.”
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Fran Beyer ✉
Fran Beyer is a writer with Newsmax and covers national politics.
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