By Jonathan Landay
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Senate intelligence committee holds a confirmation hearing on Wednesday for President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to be CIA director, John Ratcliffe, a former Republican lawmaker who was accused of using intelligence for political ends as the nation’s top spy during the incoming U.S. leader’s first term.
Ratcliffe is all but certain to win the Republican-run Senate’s approval to lead the premier U.S. intelligence agency as the United States grapples with China, Russia’s war in Ukraine and growing ties between the two nuclear powers, Iran and North Korea.
But the hearing also will replay allegations that Ratcliffe allowed politics to interfere with his work as Trump’s director of national intelligence from 2020 to 2021, said a Senate aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The opening statement of the panel’s top Democrat, Mark Warner, appeared to reflect those concerns, with the lawmaker to ask Ratcliffe to pledge to “always seek to provide unbiased, unvarnished and timely intelligence assessments.”
“I need your assurance this intelligence will represent the best judgment of the CIA, regardless of political implications or views,” Warner will tell Ratcliffe according to advance excerpts seen by Reuters.
He also will ask Ratcliffe to pledge not to “fire or force out” CIA employees for “their perceived political views” or to “place loyalty to a political figure above loyalty to country.”
The Trump transition team and the office of the committee chairman, Senator Tom Cotton, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Ratcliffe “will be a fearless fighter for the Constitutional Rights of all Americans, while assuring the Highest Levels of National Security and PEACE THROUGH STRENGTH,” Trump said in a Nov. 12 statement announcing his nominee for CIA director.
The concerns with Ratcliffe center on charges by former U.S. intelligence officials and Democrats that he made public unverified Russian intelligence in September 2020 to aid Trump, who was in a re-election fight that he lost to his Democratic opponent, President Joe Biden. Ratcliffe’s office denied this charge.
In a letter to a senator, Ratcliffe said a Russian intelligence analysis alleged that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who lost the 2016 election to Trump, had approved a plan to create “a scandal” by tying Trump to Russian President Vladimir Putin and a Russian hacking operation of the Democratic National Committee.
The then-heads of the CIA and the National Security Agency opposed releasing the material that Ratcliffe himself noted was unverified and “may reflect exaggeration or fabrication.”
The material contradicted a 2017 U.S. intelligence assessment, a special prosecutor’s findings, and a bipartisan Senate intelligence committee report that Russia used hacking and other means to try to sway the 2016 vote to Trump.
(Reporting by Jonathan Landay, additional reporting by Erin Banco; Editing by Don Durfee and Deepa Babington)
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