President-elect Donald Trump announced Tuesday that he has selected former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe to serve as the director of the CIA.
Ratcliffe worked as Trump’s DNI from 2020 to 2021 and was a House representative for a district in Texas from 2015 to 2020. Back in 2004, President George W. Bush appointed Ratcliffe as the Chief of Anti-Terrorism and National Security for the Eastern District of Texas, and he was later promoted to the Attorney General for the district, where he worked from 2007 to 2008.
The incoming CIA director is a supporter of sweeping government surveillance powers as he lobbied for the extension of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), a law that allows the government to spy on American citizens without a warrant. In 2023, Ratcliffe and several other former Trump officials, including Mike Pompeo and Bill Barr, sent a letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to support the extension.
Ratcliffe is known as a Trump loyalist for pushing back against unfounded allegations about Russian election interference in his role at the DNI. Recently, he has been pushing claims about Iran allegedly hacking the Trump campaign and plotting to kill the president-elect, a charge Tehran has strongly denied. Ratcliffe has used the allegations to call for the US to join Israel in taking a harder line against Iran.
Ratcliffe is also a China hawk and has called for the US to prepare for a “confrontation” with Beijing. “If I could communicate one thing to the American people from this unique vantage point, it is that the People’s Republic of China poses the greatest threat to America today, and the greatest threat to democracy and freedom worldwide since World War II,” he wrote in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal published in December 2020.
