Washington:

The US Senate on Thursday confirmed John Ratcliffe with overwhelming bipartisan support as director of the CIA, filling a key post in President Donald Trump’s national security team.

The upper house of the US legislature voted 74-25 to approve Ratcliffe, who served as the director of national intelligence from 2020-2021 during Trump’s first term in office.

Ratcliffe said during his confirmation hearing last week that under his leadership, the agency would “produce insightful, objective, all-source analysis, never allowing political or personal biases to cloud our judgment or infect our products.”

He also zeroed in on Beijing, saying the CIA needs to “continue and increase in intensity the focus on the threats posed by China and its ruling Chinese Communist Party.”

And he emphasized the importance of having the agency focus on technology as a target, saying that understanding adversaries’ capabilities on that front “is more important than ever.”

Ratcliffe, a former federal prosecutor, was a US representative for Texas from 2015-2020 — a period in which he helped defend Trump during the first impeachment proceedings against him.

Trump then appointed Ratcliffe to serve as the director of national intelligence, leading the US intelligence community and serving as the president’s main advisor on that topic.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

A file image of John Ratcliffe, who has been picked as Director of CIA by President-elect Donald Trump
| Photo Credit: AP

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump said on Tuesday (November 12, 2024) that he had picked former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe to serve as director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Mr. Ratcliffe, a close ally of Mr. Trump, served as director of national intelligence at the end of his first term.

Mr. Ratcliffe was confirmed as the nation’s top spy in May 2020, eight months before Mr. Trump left office. A former member of the House of Representatives and U.S. attorney for Texas, he received no support from Senate Democrats during his confirmation.

As DNI, Mr. Ratcliffe was accused by Democrats and former intelligence officials of declassifying intelligence for use by Mr. Trump and his Republican allies to attack political opponents, including Joe Biden, then Mr. Trump’s rival for the presidency, a charge Mr. Ratcliffe’s office has denied.

News outlets, including Reuters, also reported on concerns that Mr. Ratcliffe exaggerated his counter-terrorism experience as a federal prosecutor in Texas.