Trump CIA pick John Ratcliffe vows to root out political biases, focus on threats from China

CIA Director-designate John Ratcliffe vowed in his Senate confirmation hearing Wednesday that he would excise “political or personal biases” and make the spy agency “the ultimate meritocracy” — while refocusing its energy on China as the “top national security threat” to the US.Ratcliffe, who served as director of national intelligence in the first Donald Trump administration, announced before the Senate Intelligence Committee he would return the Company to its “core mission” of collecting foreign intelligence on America’s adversaries in a strictly “apolitical” manner.“To the brave CIA officers listening around the world, if all of this sounds like what you signed up for, then buckle up and get ready to make a difference,” he said.“If it doesn’t, then it’s time to find a new line of work.”“It has been said that the CIA’s World War II predecessor — the OSS — described its ideal recruit as ‘a Ph.D.

who could win a bar fight,'” he added.“This sentiment is the essence of what today’s CIA must recapture.

But we must find that fighting spirit in recruits whose talents, skill sets, and backgrounds are more varied than ever.”A recent audit of the agency found “a significant percentage of the current CIA workforce does have concerns about the objectivity of the products that they’re producing,” Ratcliffe noted, adding that some of those products end up in the President’s Daily Brief of intelligence analysis.It’s an issue that the former Texas Republican congressman also saw firsthand and called out during the FBI’s Trump-Russia collusion probe — and denounced as DNI when 51 ex-spy officials declared Hunter Biden’s laptop was “somehow a Russian intelligence operation.”“I stood alone and told the American people the truth,” he said, indirectly slamming ex-CIA director Leon Panetta, who was one of the former officials signing an open letter alleging the laptop was “Russian disinformation.”Asked ...