Tag: Rep. Ratcliffe

Senate confirms Ratcliffe to be Trump’s spy chief

The Hill logoThe Senate on Thursday confirmed Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-Texas) to be President Trump‘s next spy chief. 

Senators voted 49-44 on Ratcliffe’s nomination to the director of national intelligence(DNI), a position that has been filled in an acting capacity since former DNI Dan Coats stepped down in August.

The vote is one of the final items on the Senate’s to-do list before the chamber leaves town for a weeklong Memorial Day recess. And it comes only days after the Senate Intelligence Committee advanced Ratcliffe’s nomination along party lines. Continue reading.

John Ratcliffe, Trump’s pick for top intelligence post, clears divided Senate panel

Washington Post logoTexas congressman John Ratcliffe (R) took a step closer to becoming President Trump’s top intelligence adviser on Tuesday, after the Senate Intelligence Committee voted along party lines to move his nomination to the full Senate.

Committee members voted 8 to 7 in favor of Ratcliffe as the next director of national intelligence, following an extraordinary hearing earlier this month held under social distancing guidelines. Ratcliffe sat far back from masked senators who questioned him on his credentials and whether he was capable of acting independently of his political allegiance to the president.

The committee vote was held behind closed doors in a secure facility in the Capitol. Ratcliffe is expected to be confirmed by the full Senate in a vote likely to be held after Memorial Day, according to congressional aides. Continue reading.

Kamala Harris burns down Trump intelligence nominee over the president’s well-documented effort to minimize COVID-19 risk

AlterNet logoRep. John Ratcliffe (R-TX) was peppered with questions about how President Donald Trump has handled the COVID-19 pandemic.

At his Senate confirmation hearing for Director of National Intelligence, Ratcliffe was asked what he would do if Trump downplayed future threats as he had done with the coronavirus pandemic.

“Do you think President Trump has accurately portrayed the threat of COVID-19 to the American people?” Harris wondered. Continue reading.

Trump’s intel power play spooks the spooks

The CIA never welcomed its overlords in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. But now, the agency confronts its worst nightmare.

President Donald Trump’s nomination of Texas Rep. John Ratcliffe to serve as the nation’s intel chief has led to some apprehension within the intelligence community, which has only grudgingly come to accept the Office of the Director of National Intelligence as a force for good.

The office, established in 2004 to better coordinate the flow of information between agencies after the intelligence failures that led up to 9/11, has been most effective as a day-to-day manager focusing on bureaucratic and budgeting issues, intel veterans said — giving the agencies political top cover and more freedom to focus on their core missions.

But with a grip on the President’s Daily Brief, broad discretion over the agencies’ responsiveness to Congress, and responsibility for intelligence community whistleblowing and source protection, the DNI can easily veer into the political and revive the kind of friction that plagued its relationship with the intelligence community in its early days. Continue reading.

History repeats itself: Donald Trump tweets that John Ratcliffe will be director of national intelligence, again

Texas congressman was previously announced by Trump as his nominee for the position last July, before pulling back

Rep. John Ratcliffe is once again President Donald Trump’s choice to be director of national intelligence.

The president announced in a tweet Friday that he was nominating the Texas Republican, calling him “an outstanding man of great talent!”

This is not the first time Trump has tweeted that Ratcliffe would be nominated for the intelligence leadership post, which is currently occupied on an acting basis by U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell. Continue reading.

Trump walks back plan to nominate John Ratcliffe as DNI

Axios logoPresident Trump announced that Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-Texas) would not be nominated to become the next director of national intelligence in a pair of Friday tweets, saying it would expose him to “months of slander and libel.”

“Our great Republican Congressman John Ratcliffe is being treated very unfairly by the LameStream Media. Rather than going through months of slander and libel, I explained to John how miserable it would be for him and his family to deal with these people. John has therefore decided to stay in Congress.”

The state of play, via Axios’ Jonathan Swan: Ratcliffe withdrew himself, per sources familiar with the situation. He was watching coverage of his possible nomination pile up, and the White House was getting word that he would struggle to get enough Republicans to confirm him. Ratcliffe “thought better to pull out now than put family through confirmation only to come up shy,” texted a source familiar with his thinking.

  • According to a third source familiar with the situation, Ratcliffe did not anticipate the intensity of the reaction to his name being floated.

View the complete August 2 article on the Axios website here.

Trump’s pick for national intelligence director is disengaged from committee work on Capitol Hill, officials say

Washington Post logoPresident Trump’s nominee to be the nation’s next spy chief is regarded as a relatively disengaged member of the House Intelligence Committee and is little known across the ranks of spy agencies he has been tapped to lead, according to interviews with congressional and intelligence officials.

Though Rep. John Ratcliffe’s membership on the House committee is perhaps his most important credential for the top intelligence job, officials said he has yet to take part in one of its overseas trips to learn more about spy agencies’ work. The other new lawmakers on the panel have done so or are scheduled to travel in the coming months.

It is also unclear whether Ratcliffe (R-Tex) has spent much time at the headquarters of the CIA, the National Security Agency or other parts of the sprawling U.S. intelligence community that he has been nominated to direct.

View the complete August 1 article by Shane Harris and Greg Miller on The Washington Post website here.

Trump’s pick to lead U.S. intelligence claims he arrested 300 illegal immigrants in a single day. He didn’t.

Washington Post logoPresident Trump’s choice to lead the nation’s intelligence community often cites a massive roundup of immigrant workers at poultry plants in 2008 as a highlight of his career. Rep. John Ratcliffe claims that as a federal prosecutor in the Eastern District of Texas, he was the leader of the immigration crackdown, describing it as one of the largest cases of its kind.

“As a U.S. Attorney, I arrested over 300 illegal immigrants on a single day,” Rat­cliffe (R-Tex.) says on his congressional website.

But a closer look at the case shows that Ratcliffe’s claims conflict with the court record and the recollections of others who participated in the operation — at a time when he is under fire for embellishing his record.

View the complete August 1 article by Robert O’Harrow, Jr. and Shawn Boburg on The Washington Post website here.

As DNI, Ratcliffe May Target Washington Post

Imagine the indictment of a former national security official in the Obama administration for violation of the Espionage Act. Imagine James Clapper or Sally Yates facing the same charges as Julian Assange or Chelsea Manning.

That dream of right-wing media (and some left-wing critics) came one step closer to reality Sunday, when President Trump announced the appointment of Rep. John Ratcliffe of Texas as the new director of national intelligence. On Sunday, Ratcliffe told Fox News host Maria Bartiromo, his number one idea for “investigation of the investigators”: prosecute a source of The Washington Post.

Ratcliffe expressed the hope that the Justice Department will investigate the leak to Washington Post columnist David Ignatius in January 2017 that led to the resignation of Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn. Ignatius’ reporting raised the possibility that Flynn had lied about a pre-inauguration conversation with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Flynn was forced to resign after only 24 days on the job.

View the complete July 31 article by Jefferson Morley on the National Memo website here.

Trump might bypass protocol in naming acting intelligence chief because current deputy isn’t sufficiently loyal: report

AlterNet logoPresident Donald Trump clearly went for a loyalist when he nominated Rep. John Ratcliffe of Texas to replace National Intelligence Director Dan Coats, who has announced his resignation. But first, Ratcliffe — whose devotion to Trump was painfully evident during his hostile questioning of former special counsel Robert Mueller during a congressional hearing on July 24 — must be confirmed by the U.S. Senate. And CNN is reporting that Trump is bypassing traditional protocolswhile appointing an acting intel chief to hold the position while Ratcliffe awaits a Senate confirmation hearing.

Under a “normal” presidency with traditional protocols honored, Deputy Intelligence Director Sue Gordon would be a logical choice either as a temporary or permanent replacement for Coats. But according to two CNN sources, the problem Trump has with Gordon — even as a temporary intel chief — is that she would not be the type of unquestioning loyalist that Trump is seeking.

The Trump Administration, CNN reports, is “reviewing whether it can legally choose an acting director outside the line of succession.” But those two sources stressed to CNN that no final decision has been made.

View the complete July 30 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.