John Ratcliffe

Announced as Trump’s nominee for CIA Director

John Ratcliffe was Trump’s Director of National Intelligence (DNI) from May 2020 - January 2021. He previously served as the U.S. representative for Texas’s 4th district from 2015 to 2020 and was ranked the second most “conservative” representative in 2015-16 by the Heritage Foundation. Per Sen. Schumer, Ratcliffe was chosen as DNI “because he exhibited blind loyalty to President Trump.” Ratcliffe made public assertions that contradicted professional intelligence assessments, sidelined career intelligence briefers, and declassified materials to benefit Trump. Ratcliffe is a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a Project 2025 contributor, and the Co-Chair of the Center for American Security at the America First Policy Institute. Ratcliffe has also been helping to craft policy statements for Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign.

Ratcliffe was described as a “conspiracy theorist” and “ardent Trump defender” while in Congress. In 2018, Ratcliffe claimed to have seen text message conversations between two FBI agents investigating ties between the Trump campaign and Russia that purportedly proved there was a “secret society” in Washington working against Trump. The theory was easily debunked when the messages in question were released in full.

In July 2019, Trump rewarded Ratcliffe’s loyalty by announcing his nomination to become the DNI, which oversees all of America’s intelligence agencies. Senators on both sides of the aisle were concerned with Ratcliffe’s lack of experience in the intelligence community and his seeming disengagement with intelligence matters while serving in the House on the intelligence committee. Republican Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, expressed worry that Ratcliffe was too political to be confirmed, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer opined that Ratcliffe was “selected because he exhibited blind loyalty to President Trump.”

As other controversies emerged, just a few days after his announcement, Trump abruptly dropped his original plan to nominate Ratcliffe. But in February 2020, Trump nominated Ratcliffe again to be DNI, and he was confirmed in a 49-44 vote in May of that year. As with his first nomination, many Senate and House Democrats expressed concern that Ratcliffe’s sole qualification for the job of Director of National Intelligence seemed to have been “blind loyalty to President Trump.”

Several former intelligence officials agreed, saying Ratcliffe’s appointment risked politicizing the position, which has been considered to be largely non-partisan since the office was created after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. For example, in May 2020, it was reported that Ratcliffe followed accounts on Twitter that spewed QAnon and other conspiracy theories, including a “9/11 truther” and four other accounts that promote the alt-right conspiracy theory that the world is run by a “cabal of Democratic pedophile-cannibals.” His campaign Twitter account also follows conspiracy theorists that claim that JFK Jr. faked his death to help Trump take down the “Deep State” and that a Democratic sex dungeon exists in a D.C. pizza parlor, claims that have been repeatedly and thoroughly debunked. Ratcliffe has also promoted the notion that there is a “Spygate” scandal, suggesting the FBI went rogue when it kicked off its Trump-Russia investigation.

Right before the 2020 election, as DNI, Ratcliffe declassified a summary of an unverified Russian intelligence assessment that claimed Hillary Clinton personally approved an effort while she was a presidential candidate “to stir up a scandal” against Trump by tying him to Putin and the Russians’ hacking of the Democratic National Committee. Although members of both parties on the Senate Intelligence Committee rejected the report as lacking factual basis, Ratcliffe persisted by sending a letter to Senator Lindsay Graham, saying the Committee “does not know the accuracy of this allegation or the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect exaggeration or fabrication.”

In the lead up to January 6, Ratcliffe reportedly expressed concern that protests over the 2020 election results could become dangerous, but he never blamed Trump for the violence he incited. Instead, on February 2, 2021, Ratcliffe appeared on Fox to question the actions of the D.C. mayor, police, and Members of Congress, claiming that the National Guard was waved off–another false set of claims that have been debunked. He also claimed that Congress could have secured answers to what actually happened, but they were too consumed with Trump’s second impeachment proceedings–which were about Trump’s actions and inaction on January 6. A month later, Ratcliffe, without elaborating, asserted that “what happened on January 6th was preventable” and blamed a “failure of leadership in our law enforcement community,” not Trump.

Since leaving office, Ratcliffe has come to Trump’s defense in light of the former president’s many indictments. For example, he claimed there was nothing in the DOJ affidavit to justify the “extreme” search of Mar-a-Lago for classified documents, despite the evidence of national security risks such documents posed and even though the search was conducted consistent with standard operating proceedings. He also asserted that special counsel Jack Smith’s prosecution of Trump over his efforts to subvert the 2020 election was “nakedly political partisan prosecution,” despite the evidence in the indictment issued by the grand jury. Ratcliffe also made accusations that Smith tampered with evidence and lied to the court about it.

After he left Congress, Ratcliffe came under scrutiny for funneling money from his campaign account to his wife. In 2021, Michele Ratcliffe received $30,000 from her husband’s campaign fund for “compliance services.” According to a 2013 FEC filing, she held the position of treasurer for her husband’s campaign in 2013-14 and was not a treasurer for any other political campaigns, Ratcliffe has not run for office since 2018.

Ratcliffe has also come under fire for embellishing his past work experience, highlighting that he was the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Texas during the George W. Bush administration, even though he was only an interim holder for less than a year and never confirmed to that position. Ratcliffe emphasized his direct participation in overseeing terrorism investigations as a federal prosecutor, but Malcolm Bales, a prosecutor in the office from 1989 until 2016, revealed that he could not recall a single terrorism prosecution in the Eastern District during Ratcliffe’s time there.