Amid criticism of a lack of intelligence experience, Rep. John Ratcliffe, R-Texas, laid out his case to be confirmed as the next director of national intelligence.
"I have been handling national security issues as far back as 2005," Ratcliffe told CBS News. "I have spent four years at the Justice Department in charge of sensitive matters of national security, anti-terrorism investigations. For the last five years, I have been legislating almost exclusively on national security issues."
Ratcliffe was originally nominated to be President Donald Trump's DNI this summer, but instead the legal expert served as a driving force against the House Democrats' impeachment inquiry.
"I've had a very public role," Ratcliffe said. "People have been able to observe again my temperament, my judgment, my abilities, my talents. I've demonstrated that I've been right on some of these most important issues."
Adding, his work on impeachment will help him get confirmed – with or without support from Senate Democrats.
"Adam Schiff has a lot invested in a narrative that has proven not to be true," Ratcliffe said. "There was no Russian conspiracy.
"I think that I'll have the support of all Republicans at the end of the day."
It is not a case of mere blind Trump loyalty for being an effective defender of presidential powers either, Ratcliffe told CBS News.
"In my case he is certainly putting experience out front — as I have talked about my experience as a U.S. attorney on national security issues as a legislature almost exclusively in these areas — that was important to him," Ratcliffe said. "What we talked about is my loyalty to the constitution, to the rule of law, and standing up for people being treated fairly under that respect. My selection and nomination has to do with loyalty to the rule of law."
As for the current hot-button issue of the coronavirus, Ratcliffe gave a glimpse of his intelligence position with respect to China and North Korea, our chief far east rivals.
"We can't really count on countries like China and North Korea giving us accurate information with respect to the, for instance, number of cases and the lethality of those cases," he told CBS News. "So this is where intelligence community and our intelligence collection discipline — things like human intelligence and signals intelligence and other collection disciplines — are important to get the actual numbers, the actual data that we can get to our infectious disease experts for predictive analysis."
Ratcliffe added a new perspective is needed as the leader of the 17 U.S. intelligence organizations.
"I have not served in an intelligence agency; I think that bringing a different experience today is really going to be vitally important — all of the experience in the world isn't helpful without judgment, and I think what we have seen is that some of our most experienced intelligence officials have gotten it wrong, like regarding the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act," Ratcliffe said. "I hope to bring incredible experience regarding national security and intelligence from all of the different vantage points that I have had into a modern day intelligence community to address all of these threats."
In the end, as he did in the House Democrats' partisan impeachment case, Ratcliffe intends to take the politics out of intelligence.
"I think one of the overriding priorities for me is to ensure that our intelligence community becomes entirely apolitical and get past the finger-pointing on both sides of who's to blame with respect to that, and I'm looking forward to being the DNI where people can say 'You know what, he took politics out of it completely, he respected the good work of the warriors and the intelligence community and deliver the unvarnished truth,'" he concluded.
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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