Former Texas congressman vows to keep politics out of CIA as director

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WASHINGTON — Former Texas congressman John Ratcliffe, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the CIA, vowed to make the agency more muscular while keeping its work apolitical during his nomination hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday.

“Today, we face what may be the most challenging national security environment in our nation’s history,” Ratcliffe said. “We will collect intelligence, especially human intelligence in every corner of the globe, no matter how dark or difficult. We will produce insightful, objective all-source analysis, never allowing political or personal biases to cloud our judgment.”

The committee will vote on sending his nomination to the full Senate after Trump formally nominates him. Trump can’t formally nominate Ratcliffe until he is sworn into office on Monday.

Ratcliffe represented the 4th Congressional District from 2015 to 2020, when he was confirmed in Trump’s first administration to serve as Director of National Intelligence. Throughout his time in Congress, Ratcliffe was a staunch Trump supporter, defending the president through his numerous investigations during his first term. He was part of the president's defense team during his first impeachment in 2020.

But Ratcliffe reportedly broke from the president following the 2020 presidential election. He warned White House staffers against attempts to overturn the election results, fearing it would be detrimental for the country’s democracy, former White House staffer Cassidy Hutchison recounted in 2022.

When U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton, the committee’s chair, asked about Ratcliffe’s partisan background as a U.S. congressman, Ratcliffe said he would not allow partisan politics to cloud his work. He also vowed to keep the Intelligence Committee informed if he ever gets requests from the White House to remove intelligence staffers or officials for political reasons and ban any kind of political loyalty tests from the White House at the agency.

“While I enjoyed my time in Congress, I enjoyed more my time as [director of National Intelligence],” Ratcliffe told the committee, asserting he served in that role objectively. “It’s absolutely essential that the CIA’s director be apolitical.”

Ratcliffe specified political interference would include meddling from the White House’s political interests as well as the agency’s diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, which he cast as a “politically motivated, bureaucratically imposed social justice agenda”. He promised not to change analysis to make it more palatable to Trump, who has derided the Intelligence Community as part of the “deep state.”

Ratcliffe’s path to confirmation appears much smoother compared to the last time he was up for Senate review. Ratcliffe initially withdrew from consideration as Director of National Intelligence in 2020 after The Washington Post reported that he had exaggerated his role in a 2008 crackdown on undocumented workers. But Trump pushed through his nomination anyway, and Ratcliffe secured confirmation in the Senate in 2020 on a 49-44 vote, with no Democrats voting for him. He was the first director of National Intelligence to be confirmed without any support from the opposing party.

This time, Ratcliffe is among the less controversial of Trump’s planned nominees. He did not face personal attacks from Democratic members of the committee on Wednesday, in a stark contrast to the Senate Armed Services’ acerbic questioning Tuesday of Trump’s pick for Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth.

“You obviously have an appreciation for the work done by our intelligence community, generally, and the CIA, specifically,” said U.S. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee. Warner cited Ratcliffe’s past serving as Director of National Intelligence and on the House Intelligence Committee.

U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, who sits on the Intelligence Committee, said Wednesday he had “every confidence you will do an outstanding job as the next director of the CIA.” Cornyn has known Ratcliffe dating to his time as mayor of Heath, Texas, from 2004 to 2012 and supported Ratcliffe as a member of the committee during his DNI confirmation process. Both Cornyn and Cruz said they would support all of Trump’s nominations this year.

If confirmed, Ratcliffe would report to Trump’s new Director of National Intelligence. Trump named former Democratic U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard for that role — a far more controversial choice that has prompted backlash from Democrats, former intelligence officials and even some Republicans. Gabbard has previously expressed sympathy for Russian President Vladimir Putin and ousted Syrian President Bashar Al Assad.

The CIA will take a critical role in the Trump administration’s foreign policy. Trump has vowed to take a much more hawkish approach to some of the country’s biggest adversaries, namely China.

The CIA has faced criticism recently for failing to predict some of the biggest foreign policy catastrophes of the Biden presidency, including the fall of Kabul in 2021 and the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

“The Intelligence Community, for which I have the greatest respect, has had some significant misjudgments lately,” U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said, citing the fall of Afghanistan, Hamas’ attack on Israel and the South Korean declaration of martial law.

Ratcliffe promised to invest more heavily in human intelligence, or “stealing secrets” as Cotton put it, to avoid future failures. He identified trans-national criminal organizations crossing the Southern border, Russia, Iran and North Korea as pressing national security threats. But no threat is greater than China, he said, particularly in the technology sector.

“Good decisions are hostage to good information and good intelligence,” Ratcliffe said. “The better we do at collecting human intelligence, the better decisions you all can make, the better analytic judgments analysts can make, and the fewer intelligence lapses or failures.”

The Senate Intelligence Committee is one of the most bipartisan committees in Congress. It often operates behind closed doors to discuss sensitive information. The committee continued to question Ratcliffe in a private meeting Wednesday after the public hearing concluded. Ratcliffe reserved some of his detailed plans for countering adversaries in the technology sphere for the classified meeting.