CIA Director-designate John Ratcliffe vowed in his Senate confirmation hearing Wednesday that he would excise “political or personal biases” and make the spy agency “the ultimate meritocracy” — while refocusing its energy on China as the “top national security threat” to the US.
Ratcliffe, who served as director of national intelligence in the first Donald Trump administration, announced before the Senate Intelligence Committee he would return the Company to its “core mission” of collecting foreign intelligence on America’s adversaries in a strictly “apolitical” manner.
“To the brave CIA officers listening around the world, if all of this sounds like what you signed up for, then buckle up and get ready to make a difference,” he said. “If it doesn’t, then it’s time to find a new line of work.”
“It has been said that the CIA’s World War II predecessor — the OSS — described its ideal recruit as ‘a Ph.D. who could win a bar fight,’” he added. “This sentiment is the essence of what today’s CIA must recapture. But we must find that fighting spirit in recruits whose talents, skill sets, and backgrounds are more varied than ever.”
A recent audit of the agency found “a significant percentage of the current CIA workforce does have concerns about the objectivity of the products that they’re producing,” Ratcliffe noted, adding that some of those products end up in the President’s Daily Brief of intelligence analysis.
It’s an issue that the former Texas Republican congressman also saw firsthand and called out during the FBI’s Trump-Russia collusion probe — and denounced as DNI when 51 ex-spy officials declared Hunter Biden’s laptop was “somehow a Russian intelligence operation.”
“I stood alone and told the American people the truth,” he said, indirectly slamming ex-CIA director Leon Panetta, who was one of the former officials signing an open letter alleging the laptop was “Russian disinformation.”
Asked by Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) whether he would “ever change or remove content in an intelligence assessment for political reasons or at the behest of political leadership,” the CIA pick said, “No.”
Ratcliffe also declared that “the world’s premier intelligence agency” under his leadership would “steal secrets” from adversarial nations — contradicting remarks from former spy chief John Brennan — and especially “increase” its “focus on the threats posed by China and its ruling Chinese Communist Party.”
“As DNI, I dramatically increased the Intelligence Community’s resources devoted to China,” he recalled. “I openly warned the American people that from my unique vantage point as the official who saw more intelligence than anyone else, I assessed that China was far and away our top national security threat.”
In an interview broadcast Sunday night on CBS’ “60 Minutes,” outgoing FBI Director Christopher Wray called China the “defining threat of our generation.”
Republicans and Democrats on the intelligence panel expressed no major reservations about Ratcliffe’s candidacy, likely putting him on a glide path to full Senate confirmation — potentially as soon as Jan. 20, one source close to the process told The Post.
Some Democrats, however, expressed concerns about potential “loyalty tests” being imposed to oust civil servants, to which the expected spy boss said he “will” prohibit them.
Ratcliffe added his expected term would come amid “the most challenging national security environment in our nation’s history,” adding that it included the southern border, which has seen hundreds of migrants with terror ties crossing it in recent years.
Several lawmakers agreed with his assessment, while citing glaring failures by the US Intelligence Community (IC) in response to crises.
“There was some misjudgment of how long the Afghan government would stand after the United States’ hasty and ill-advised withdrawal,” said Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine). “The IC missed early assessments on Ukraine’s willingness to fight, projecting incorrectly how quickly the Russians would be able to take Kyiv.
“They did not warn or predict of the Hamas mass attack against Israel. The IC was surprised at South Korea’s martial law declaration,” she went on. “Nor did they predict the rapid collapse of the Syrian regime.”
Asked how he would avoid the same pitfalls, Ratcliffe responded: “If you have a politically motivated, bureaucratically imposed social justice agenda that takes a part of your attention, that can distract from the core mission of collecting human intelligence that matters and providing it to you in a timely way.”
Elsewhere, Ratcliffe also discussed his views on declassification of intelligence while maintaining the “trust” of US allies, the controversial spy power known as FISA Section 702, anomalous health incidents like Havana syndrome — and the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) said he had constituents who were “threatened on Election Day by an ISIS terrorist in Oklahoma City that was discovered initially by a 702″ query.
“That 702 authority is important,” Lankford emphasized of the authority that lets intelligence agencies like the FBI sweep up text messages, emails and other communications from foreign targets without a warrant
“FISA, and particularly Section 702, is an indispensable national security tool,” Ratcliffe affirmed while clarifying that it has been “abused” — such as during the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane probe into the 2016 Trump campaign.
It makes up “sometimes more than half of the actionable foreign intelligence that we provide to the president,” the Texan noted.
Critics of Section 702, who used to count DNI pick Tulsi Gabbard among their number, maintain that the authority violates US citizens’ Fourth Amendment rights by obtaining without a warrant any of their communications traded with foreign nationals outside the country.
“What you can’t have is accessing that or making a query for political reasons or for some reason other than protecting our national security,” Ratcliffe added, saying “safeguards” would prevent that and noting that “the critics haven’t provided any alternative.”
On COVID, the CIA chief-in-waiting committed to better communication for preventing the next pandemic — but did not discuss how FBI and Defense Department scientists were purportedly “silenced” for trying to put forward evidence that the virus leaked out of a Chinese lab in Wuhan.
“We never really got resolution on that, which is a concern for me,” said Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), though multiple congressional investigations compiled evidence that heavily favored a lab-leak origin.
Ratcliffe, who previously testified to Congress that the lab-leak theory was the “only” explanation for the pandemic, did say that Americans should “in some cases, demand” to know the causes of COVID, which he said may have killed as many as 25 million people worldwide.
In his opening statement, Ratcliffe thanked current CIA Director William Burns for “a smooth and professional transition.”
Burns told NPR in an outgoing interview earlier this month that the agency “formed a new China mission center,” the first of its kind for an adversarial nation and one comprising roughly 20% of the CIA’s total budget.
“This is one of those moments of, I think, revolutionary change on the international landscape, with intense major power competition with China and with Russia,” Burns said, “but also a revolution in technology, unlike anything we’ve seen since the Industrial Revolution.”
