WASHINGTON (AP) — President-elect Donald Trump announced Tuesday that he would appoint John Ratcliffe as CIA director in his new administration.
Here are five things to know about the Republican appointed to lead the US government’s top spy agency:
Stint No. 2 in the Trump administration
Ratcliffe spent the final months of Trump’s first term as director of national intelligence, leading the US government’s spy agencies during the coronavirus pandemic.
His position as DNI also made him responsible for detecting and countering foreign attempts to interfere in American politics. That experience makes him a more traditional choice for the job, which requires Senate confirmation, than some rumored loyalists are being pushed by some Trump supporters.
As DNI, Ratcliffe took part in an unusual late-night press conference just weeks before the 2020 presidential election in which he and other officials accused Iran of being responsible for a barrage of emails intended to intimidate US voters .
While serving in that role, Ratcliffe was criticized for declassifying Russian intelligence officials claiming to reveal information about Democrats during the 2016 election, even as he acknowledged this may not have been true. Democrats blasted the move as a partisan stunt that politicized the intelligence community.
A fierce loyalist in Congress
Ratcliffe was elected to Congress in 2014, but his visibility rose in 2019 as a staunch defender of Trump during the House of Representatives’ first impeachment trial.
He served on Trump’s impeachment advisory team and vigorously questioned witnesses during the impeachment hearings.
“This is the thinnest, fastest, 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 Zelensky.
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 among the more ardent Republican questioners, vigorously questioning the prosecutor and rejecting the report he prepared .
Previous questions about his resume
Although Ratcliffe eventually got the DNI job, things did not go smoothly.
In fact, he withdrew from consideration in August 2019 after just five days as he faced increasing questions about his experience and qualifications.
Trump has put forward Ratcliffe’s name to replace the departed Dan Coats. But Democrats openly dismissed the Republican as an unconditional partisan, and Republicans offered only lukewarm and cautious expressions of support. Multiple news stories questioned Ratcliffe’s qualifications and suggested he misrepresented his experience as a federal prosecutor in Texas.
Ratcliffe said in a statement at the time that he remained confident he could have done the job “with the objectivity, fairness and integrity that our intelligence services need and deserve.”
“But,” he added, “I do not want any national security and intelligence debate surrounding my nomination, no matter how untrue, to become a purely political and partisan issue.”
He was renominated the following February and confirmed in May 2020 by a sharply divided Senate.
A Chinese hawk
Ratcliffe has repeatedly sounded the alarm about China, calling the country the greatest threat to American interests and the rest of the free world.
That view puts him in good company with other new Trump administration officials, including Michael Waltz, Trump’s pick for national security adviser, who called for a U.S. boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing over China’s involvement in the creation. of COVID-19 and the continued mistreatment of the Muslim Uyghur minority population.
“The information is clear: Beijing plans to dominate the US and the rest of the planet economically, militarily and technologically,” Ratcliffe wrote in a December 2020 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. “Many of China’s major public initiatives and leading companies provide only a layer of camouflage for the activities of the Chinese Communist Party.”
China is bracing for new tensions with the Trump administration — and possibly a tariff war — while national security and intelligence officials who track China remain concerned about economic espionage, cyberattacks, technological advances and disputes over Taiwan that could further disrupt relations.
