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President-elect Donald Trump has announced that he would appoint John Ratcliffe to serve as CIA director in his new administration.
Ratcliffe served as director of national intelligence for the final months of Trump’s first term, leading American spy agencies during the coronavirus pandemic and as the U.S. government contended with foreign efforts to interfere in the 2020 presidential election.
His past experience in intelligence makes him a more traditional pick for the job, which requires Senate confirmation, than some rumored loyalists pushed by some of Trump’s supporters.
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As DNI, Ratcliffe participated in an unusual night-time news conference just weeks before the 2020 presidential election in which he and other officials accused Iran of being responsible for a barrage of emails meant to intimidate voters in the U.S.
He also faced criticism for declassifying Russian intelligence alleging damaging information about Democrats from the 2016 election even while acknowledging that it was unverified. Democrats decried the move as a partisan stunt that politicized intelligence.
Ratcliffe made headlines again weeks later when he rejected claims by dozen of former intelligence officials that the disclosure of emails from a laptop dropped off by Hunter Biden at a Delaware computer repair shop bore the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign.
“The intelligence community doesn’t believe that because there’s no intelligence that supports that,” he said.
Ratcliffe was elected to Congress in 2014, but his visibility rose in 2019 as an ardent defender of Trump during the House’s first impeachment proceedings against him.
He was a member of Trump’s impeachment advisory team and strenuously questioned witnesses during the impeachment hearings.
“This is the thinnest, fastest and weakest impeachment our country has ever seen,” Ratcliffe said after the Democratic-controlled House voted to impeach Trump over a phone call he had with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
When former special counsel Robert Mueller appeared before the House Judiciary Committee to testify about his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, Ratcliffe was one of the more ardent Republican interrogators, forcefully questioning the prosecutor and blasting the report he produced.
