What to know about John Ratcliffe, Trump's pick for CIA director

WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump announced Tuesday that he would appoint John Ratcliffe to serve as CIA director in his new administration.

Here are four things to know about the Republican tapped to lead the U.S. government's premier spy agency:

Stint No. 2 in the Trump administration

Ratcliffe served as director of national intelligence for the final months of Trump's first term, leading American spy agencies during the coronavirus pandemic and as the U.S. government contended with foreign efforts to interfere in the 2020 presidential election.

His past experience in intelligence makes him a more traditional pick for the job, which requires Senate confirmation, than some rumored loyalists pushed by some of Trump's supporters.

As DNI, Ratcliffe participated in an unusual night-time news conference just weeks before the 2020 presidential election in which he and other officials accused Iran of being responsible for a barrage of emails meant to intimidate voters in the U.S.

He also faced criticism for declassifying Russian intelligence alleging damaging information about Democrats from the 2016 election even while acknowledging that it was unverified. Democrats decried the move as a partisan stunt that politicized intelligence.

''The intelligence community doesn't believe that because there's no intelligence that supports that,'' he said.

A fierce loyalist in Congress

Ratcliffe was elected to Congress in 2014, but his visibility rose in 2019 as an ardent defender of Trump during the House's first impeachment proceedings against him.

He was a member of Trump's impeachment advisory team and strenuously questioned witnesses during the impeachment hearings.

''This is the thinnest, fastest and weakest impeachment our country has ever seen,'' Ratcliffe said after the Democratic-controlled House voted to impeach Trump over a phone call he had with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Past questions over his resume

Though Ratcliffe ultimately got the DNI job, it wasn't smooth sailing.

In fact, he withdrew from consideration in August 2019 after just five days as he faced growing questions about his experience and qualifications.

Trump put Ratcliffe's name forward to replace the departed Dan Coats. But Democrats openly dismissed the Republican as an unqualified partisan, and Republicans offered only lukewarm and tentative expressions of support. Multiple news stories questioned Ratcliffe's qualifications and suggested that he had misrepresented his experience as a federal prosecutor in Texas, a job he held before joining Congress.

Ratcliffe said in a statement at the time that he remained convinced that he could have done the job ''with the objectivity, fairness and integrity that our intelligence agencies need and deserve.''

He was put up again for the job the following February and confirmed in May 2020 by a sharply divided Senate.

A China hawk

Ratcliffe has repeatedly sounded the alarm about China, calling the country the top threat to U.S. interests and the rest of the free world.

That view places him in good company with other incoming Trump administration officials, including Michael Waltz, Trump's pick for national security adviser, who called for a U.S. boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing due to China's involvement in the origin of COVID-19 and its ongoing mistreatment of the minority Muslim Uyghur population.

''The intelligence is clear: Beijing intends to dominate the U.S. and the rest of the planet economically, militarily and technologically,'' Ratcliffe wrote in a December 2020 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. ''Many of China's major public initiatives and prominent companies offer only a layer of camouflage to the activities of the Chinese Communist Party.''