Trump picks John Ratcliffe as CIA director. Here’s what you should know

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

Here are four things to know about the Republican slated to take the helm of the U.S. government’s top 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.

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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 flood of emails intended to intimidate U.S. voters

He also faced criticism for declassifying Russian intelligence containing allegedly damaging information about Democrats from the 2016 election, although he acknowledged it was unverified. Democrats condemned the move as a partisan move that politicized the intelligence community.

Ratcliffe made headlines again weeks later when he dismissed claims from dozens of former intelligence officials that the disclosure of emails from a laptop dropped off by Hunter Biden 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 as a passionate defender of Trump rose in 2019 during the House’s first impeachment trial 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.

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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 impassioned Republican interrogators, vigorously questioning the prosecutor and sharply criticizing the report he had prepared.

Previous questions about his resume

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

In fact, he withdrew from the exam in August 2019 after just five days as he faced increasing 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.”

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“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 renominated for the position the following February and confirmed by a closely divided Senate in May 2020.

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 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 due to China’s involvement in the emergence of COVID-19 called for continued mistreatment of the Uyghur Muslim minority.

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“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.