4 things to know about John Ratcliffe, Trump’s pick for CIA director

WASHINGTON (AP) — President-elect Donald Trump announced Tuesday that he will nominate John Ratcliffe to serve as CIA director in his new government.

Here are four things you should know The Republican typed to lead the US government’s premier spy agency:

Stint No. 2 in the Trump administration

Ratcliffe served as director of national intelligence in the final months of Trump’s first term, leading American spy agencies during the coronavirus pandemic and as the U.S. government grappled with foreign efforts to interfere in the 2020 presidential election.

His previous intelligence experience makes him a more traditional candidate for the job, which requires Senate confirmation, than some would-be loyalists pushed by some of Trump’s supporters.

As DNI, Ratcliffe took part in an unusual late-night press conference Just weeks before the 2020 presidential election, he and other officials accused Iran of being responsible for a flood of emails intended to intimidate U.S. voters

He was also criticized for declassifying Russian intelligence claimed damaging information about Democrats from the 2016 election, but admitted it was not verified. Democrats condemned the move as a partisan move that politicized the intelligence community.

Ratcliffe made headlines again weeks later as he dismissed claims from dozens of former intelligence officials that the disclosure of emails from a laptop that Hunter Biden dropped off at a computer repair shop in Delaware bore the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign.

“The intelligence community doesn’t believe that because there is no intelligence agency to support it,” he said.

A passionate loyalist in Congress

Ratcliffe was elected to Congress in 2014, but his visibility increased in 2019 an ardent defender of Trump during the first impeachment trial in the House of Representatives against him.

He was a member of Trump’s impeachment advisory team and intensively questioned witnesses during the impeachment hearings.

“This is the thinnest, fastest and weakest impeachment process our country has ever seen,” Ratcliffe said after the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives voted to impeach Trump following a phone call 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 one of the more passionate Republican interrogators. forcefully question the prosecutor and blow up the report he prepared.

Previous questions about his resume

Although Ratcliffe ultimately got the DNI job, it didn’t go smoothly.

Actually, he withdrew from the exam in August 2019 After just five days, he found himself increasingly confronted with questions about his experience and qualifications.

Trump suggested Ratcliffe’s name as a replacement for the late Dan Coats. But Democrats openly dismissed the Republican as an unqualified partisan, and Republicans expressed only lukewarm and hesitant expressions of support. Several news stories questioned Ratcliffe’s qualifications and suggested that he had misrepresented his experience as a federal prosecutor in Texas, a position he held before entering Congress.

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 community needs and deserves.”

“However,” he added, “I do not want a national security and intelligence debate surrounding my confirmation, however untrue, to become a purely political and partisan affair.”

He was hired for the position again the following February confirmed in May 2020 by a closely divided Senate.

A China Falcon

Ratcliffe has repeatedly sounded the alarm about China, calling the country the greatest threat to the interests of the United States and the rest of the free world.

That view puts him in good company with other new Trump administration appointees. including Michael Waltz, Trump’s choice for national security adviserwho called for a U.S. boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing due to China’s involvement in the emergence of COVID-19 and its ongoing mistreatment of the Uyghur Muslim minority.

“The intelligence is clear: Beijing intends to economically, militarily and technologically dominate the United States and the rest of the planet,” Ratcliffe wrote in a December 2020 Wall Street Journal editorial. “Many of China’s major public initiatives and prominent companies are just bidding a cover for the activities of the Chinese Communist Party.”

China is bracing for renewed tensions with the Trump administration – and possibly a tariff war – as national security and intelligence officials tracking China remain concerned about economic espionage, cyberattacks, technological advances and disputes over Taiwan that are further destabilizing relations could shake.