Trump Spy Chief Pick Gets Second Shot With Virus Under Scrutiny
Trump Spy Chief Pick Gets Second Shot With Virus Under Scrutiny
(Bloomberg) -- Texas Representative John Ratcliffe gets a second chance at becoming Donald Trump’s spy chief as the president seeks a loyalist who backed him during the impeachment saga at a critical moment in his administration’s fight against the coronavirus pandemic.
Ratcliffe -- who withdrew himself from consideration for the post last year amid tepid Republican support and accusations he exaggerated his qualifications -- faces a hearing Tuesday before the Senate Intelligence Committee to be Trump’s next director of national intelligence.
The hearing marks the Senate’s return to Washington amid the Covid-19 crisis, and increasing pressure by the administration to blame China for the scale of the pandemic. Echoing Trump, Secretary of State Michael Pompeo on Sunday said that there’s “enormous evidence” the outbreak began in a Chinese research lab in the city of Wuhan, a charge officials in Beijing reject.
Despite past questions about his qualifications, the 54-year-old Ratcliffe won critical support Friday when Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine, a swing vote on the intelligence panel, said he has “the experience to meet the statutory standard” to oversee the nation’s 17 intelligence agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency.
Democrats will press Ratcliffe on whether he’ll be objective in presenting the intelligence community’s views, even though Trump has repeatedly attacked “Deep State” officials within the agencies for seeking to undermine his presidency.
“There’s nothing more important than the intelligence community being objective and being seen as being objective,” said Michael Morell, a former acting director of the CIA in the Obama administration. “If it loses either one of those two things then its usefulness to the nation declines significantly.”
Top congressional Democrats including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi both say Ratcliffe has shown an unacceptable embrace of “conspiracy theories” and isn’t the right person to be DNI.
“The last time this nomination was unsuccessfully put forward, serious bipartisan questions were raised about Rep. Ratcliffe’s background and qualifications,” Virginia Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the intelligence panel, tweeted after Trump renominated him. “It’s hard for me to see how anything new has happened to change that.”
But with support from Collins and a Republican majority in the Senate, Ratcliffe’s nomination looks likely to pass, even if key GOP lawmakers have been unenthusiastic in their statements of support. Several cite the need for the intelligence community to have a confirmed leader nine months after former DNI Dan Coats -- who rebuked Trump’s embrace of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s denials of election interference -- departed.
“There is no substitute for having a permanent, Senate-confirmed Director of National Intelligence in place to lead our IC,” Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr of North Carolina said Feb. 28 in a statement lacking the typical praise for a highly-qualified candidate. A spokesman, Catilin Carroll, said there have been no updated comments from the senator.
Since Coats’ departure, the post has been filled by two acting directors, with U.S. Ambassador to Germany Ric Grenell in the position now. Besides helping sift through intelligence on the coronavirus’s origins, Ratcliffe will have a key role in the administration’s efforts to counter foreign efforts to interfere in the 2020 presidential election, assess Iranian and North Korean nuclear programs, and prepare the president’s regular intelligence briefings.
Impeachment Probe
The former mayor of Heath, Texas, became a Trump favorite after he stood out in 2018 -- along with current White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and other conservative lawmakers -- on a House task force pursuing the theory that anti-Trump bias and support for Democrat Hillary Clinton tainted the FBI’s Trump-Russia probe early on.
He eventually became a leading House critic of former special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. The White House took note of his aggressive questioning of Mueller before the House Judiciary Committee in July 2019.
“You wrote 180 pages -- 180 pages! -- about decisions that weren’t reached, about potential crimes that weren’t charged,” Ratcliffe said. “And respectfully, respectfully, by doing that you managed to violate every principle and the most sacred tradition about prosecutors not offering extra-prosecutorial analysis about potential crimes not charged.”
Skeptical Views
Ratcliffe’s second chance for the job opened up when Trump abruptly replaced the acting head of U.S. intelligence, Joseph Maguire, in February. The move came after an official working for Maguire told the House Intelligence Committee that Russia preferred that Trump wins re-election in November.
In early April, Trump fired Michael Atkinson, the inspector general for U.S. intelligence agencies. Atkinson had previously notified Congress about a whistle-blower complaint about Trump’s actions toward Ukraine, which eventually led to Trump being impeached.
Those kind of episodes have Trump critics and many former officials skeptical that the president will ever give up trying to bend the intelligence committee to his political views.
“The president has put an awful lot of pressure on the intelligence community to see issues the way he sees them,” said Morell, the former acting director of the CIA, during an online forum hosted by The Hayden Center on April 30.
Yet even if he has enough Republican support, Ratcliffe will have to answer tough questions in public at Tuesday’s hearing, which Marc Polymeropoulos, a former CIA official, said will be watched closely by the rank-and-file in the intelligence community Ratcliffe could soon be leading.
They’ll want to know if their next DNI will “speak truth to power, even when it is inconvenient or uncomfortable,” he said.
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