"This time next week we will no longer have a Director of National Intelligence. The current DNI, Dan Coats, is out effective next week," Maddow said.
"The president’s first choice to replace him was a rapidly pro-Trump Texas Republican congressman named John Radcliffe. That imploded when the congressman bragged about lots of things on his résumé that were not things he’d actually not done," she reminded.
"Given the humiliation that happened with Ratcliff, you might think the president would be careful about his second choice for the job -- ha!" Maddow said.
"Now, actually, one of the names they're floating for the job is a man named Pete Hoekstra. Remember him?" she asked.
"It’s possible there’s a different Pete Hoekstra than the one we’re all thinking of," she said. "I hope so, because the Pete Hoekstra I'm thinking of -- the one I think the president is talking about for Director of National Intelligence -- is the man who earned himself the nickname 'The Human Sieve' because of his terrible track record of leaking like a sieve and being unable to keep even the most basic secret," she continued.
"Like the time in 2009 he went on a congressional delegation to Iraq, a trip that he was supposed to keep secret for operational security reasons, and he ended up live-tweeting it all in real-time," she reminded.
"The Pete Hoekstra I'm thinking of published an op-ed in the New York Post complaining that 'leaks to the news media have seriously undermined anti-terrorist intelligence programs' -- and then two paragraphs later in the same essay Hoekstra himself leaked classified information about that year's budget for human intelligence programs," she continued. "In print!"
"The Pete Hoekstra I’m thinking of in 2006 convinced the Bush administration to post a whole bunch of documents seized from Iraq on the internet," she recalled. "It turns out the documents included instructions in Arabic for making an atomic bomb."
"The man is colander. That’s the Pete Hoekstra I am thinking of. If the President Trump is seriously thinking of the same guy to be the Director of National Intelligence, I should be Miss America," she quipped.
"I mean that guy?" she added.
Watch:
Graphic showing the hyoid bone by OpenStax College via Wikimedia Commons.[/caption]