By ÉRIC TUCKER
WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump announced Tuesday that he will nominate John Ratcliffe to serve as CIA director in his new administration.
Here are four things to know about the Republican chosen to lead the US government’s first spy agency:
Second term in the Trump administration
Ratcliffe served as director of national intelligence during the final months of Trump’s first term, leading U.S. spy agencies during the coronavirus pandemic and as the U.S. government battled foreign efforts to interfere in Trump’s presidential election. 2020.
His past experience in intelligence makes him a more traditional choice for the job, which requires Senate confirmation, than some loyalists pushed by some Trump supporters.
As DNI, Ratcliffe participated in an unusual nighttime press conference just weeks before the 2020 presidential election, during which he and other officials accused Iran of being responsible for a barrage of emails intended to intimidate American voters.
He was also criticized for declassifying Russian intelligence, alleging damaging information about Democrats in the 2016 election while acknowledging it was unverified. Democrats denounced the move, calling it a partisan stunt aimed at politicizing intelligence.
Ratcliffe made headlines again a few weeks later when he rejected claims by a dozen former intelligence officials that the disclosure of emails from a laptop dropped by Hunter Biden at a training workshop Delaware computer repair shop bore the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign.
“The intelligence community doesn’t believe that because there’s no intelligence to support that,” he said.
A fierce congressional loyalist
Ratcliffe was elected to Congress in 2014, but his profile rose in 2019 as a staunch defender of Trump during the House’s first impeachment proceedings against him.
He was a member of Trump’s impeachment advisory team and vigorously questioned witnesses during the impeachment hearings.
“This is the thinnest, quickest, weakest impeachment our country has ever seen,” Ratcliffe said after the Democratic-controlled House voted to impeach Trump in of a phone call 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 most ardent Republican interrogators, forcefully questioning the prosecutor and castigating the report he had produced.
Past questions on your CV
Although Ratcliffe ultimately got the DNI job, it wasn’t smooth sailing.
In fact, he withdrew in August 2019 after just five days, as he faced growing questions about his experience and qualifications.
Trump proposed Ratcliffe’s name to replace the deceased Dan Coats. But Democrats openly rejected the Republican, calling him a die-hard partisan, and Republicans offered only lukewarm and timid expressions of support. Several news reports questioned Ratcliffe’s qualifications and suggested that he misrepresented his experience as a federal prosecutor in Texas, a position he held before joining Congress.
Ratcliffe said in a statement at the time that he remained convinced that he could have done this work “with the objectivity, fairness and integrity that our intelligence agencies need and deserve.”
“However,” he added, “I do not want a national security and intelligence debate surrounding my confirmation, however false it may be, to become a purely political and partisan issue.”
He was re-elected to the position the following February and confirmed in May 2020 by a sharply divided Senate.
A Chinese falcon
Ratcliffe has repeatedly sounded the alarm about China, calling it the primary threat to U.S. 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 has called for a U.S. boycott of the Olympic Games. winter of 2022 in Beijing due to China’s involvement in the origin of COVID-19 and the mistreatment of the Uyghur Muslim minority.
“The intelligence is clear: Beijing intends to dominate the United States and the rest of the planet economically, militarily and technologically,” Ratcliffe wrote in a December 2020 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. “Many major public initiatives and high-profile companies in China 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 perhaps a tariff war — while national security and intelligence officials tracking China remain concerned about economic espionage, cyberattacks, technological advancements and disputes over Taiwan that could further deteriorate relations.
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