John Ratcliffe, a former congressman and President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the CIA, faces a confirmation hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee Wednesday, where Democrats will likely press him on the claim he “politicized intelligence” while serving as director of national intelligence in Trump’s first administration.
According to his prepared opening remarks to the committee, Ratcliffe will praise the CIA as “the world’s premier intelligence agency” while emphasizing its need to adapt to challenges like artificial intelligence. He will highlight the threat of the Chinese Communist Party, the need for the U.S. to avoid getting pulled into the Ukraine War with Russia, the threat of the Iranian regime and its proxies across the Middle East, the issues with North Korea, and the dangers of America’s open border.
He will highlight his nearly 25 years of experience in national security, from serving as the chief of anti-terrorism in the Eastern District of Texas to his time as a congressman on national security committees, to his time serving as Trump’s director of national intelligence. His role in the last administration gave him experience working with the CIA.
Ratcliffe will conclude his remarks with a warning about China.
“As DNI, I dramatically increased the intelligence community’s resources devoted to China,” he will say. “I openly warned the American people that from my unique vantage point as the official who saw more U.S. intelligence than anyone else, I assessed that China was far and away our top national security threat.”
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Ratcliffe mentioned his pushback on the idea that the laptop owned by former President Joe Biden’s son Hunter was “Russian disinformation” as an example of him speaking truth to power.
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Current and former CIA officials told CNN they are concerned about Ratcliffe’s relatively brief experience with the intelligence community and with his “politicization of intelligence.” Yet some expressed relief about Ratcliffe, due to his previous experience as director of national intelligence.
Ratcliffe took a new active approach to the director role, representing the president’s priorities and engaging with the intelligence community rather than following its lead. He served as an advocate for Trump against agencies that occasionally opposed the president, and that advocacy made him unpopular in certain circles.
“Prior DNIs were the head of the IC only on paper and were routinely accustomed to yielding IC actions and decisions to the preferences of the CIA and other agencies,” Ratcliffe said in an interview for the Project 2025 book “Mandate for Leadership.”
“My ability to begin reversing that capitulation was accomplished solely because President Trump made it repeatedly clear to the entire national security apparatus that he expected all intelligence matters to go through the DNI,” he explained.
Victoria Coates, vice president of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy at The Heritage Foundation, vouched for Ratcliffe as a change agent.
“He has shown the ability to go after these reforms, to question cherished assumptions, and I think he will be very successful,” Coates told The Daily Signal in an interview Tuesday.
She said Ratcliffe will face a “very different challenge” at the CIA. That agency is “more in the business of managing the production of intelligence analysis.”
“Up until now, the analysis—not just the raw information, but the analysis—has been very biased towards a specific viewpoint,” Coates added. Ratcliffe will question those biases, she said.
“The analysis is an art, not a science, and the conclusions drawn are a product of human beings,” she noted.
Reform at the CIA is essential, Coates argued. She highlighted four recent serious intelligence failures:
- The CIA predicted the Afghan government would last for at least six months against the Taliban when the U.S. pulled out of Afghanistan.
- The CIA failed to predict that Russian President Vladimir Putin would invade Ukraine and then predicted that Ukraine would fail to resist.
- She noted that National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said, “The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades,” just over a week before the Hamas Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks on Israel.
- The fall of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad reportedly surprised U.S. officials.
“Either they’re getting bad information or they are reading it incorrectly or their faulty assumptions are guiding them,” Coates said.
She also noted that Ratcliffe had interacted with Trump’s current pick for director of national intelligence, former Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, on the campaign trail. She expressed confidence that Trump wouldn’t have nominated them both if he didn’t think they could work well together.
“I don’t think he would have made these two appointments unless the president-elect was confident that they could coordinate in these roles,” Coates explained. “John will be great at reorganizing and strengthening the CIA, and Tulsi would be good at pushing back some of the deep state elements, asking uncomfortable questions.”
“I think they’ll be a good team,” she added.