A Trump loyalist nominated as director of national intelligence (DNI) looked set to sail through Senate confirmation hearings on Tuesday, only nine months after being forced to withdraw for having exaggerated his security experience.
Related: John Ratcliffe: Trump’s intelligence chief pick withdraws amid qualification doubts
John Ratcliffe, a Republican congressman who fiercely defended the president in last year’s impeachment hearings, told the Senate intelligence committee that he would speak truth to power if confirmed as DNI.
Ratcliffe was reminded by Democratic senators that his two predecessors had been forced from their posts because the findings of the intelligence community irritated Donald Trump, and that the spy agencies were currently under pressure to provide evidence for Trump’s claim that the coronavirus outbreak started in a Chinese laboratory.
“Regardless of what anyone wants our intelligence to reflect, the intelligence I will provide, if confirmed, will not be impacted or altered as a result of outside influence,” Ratcliffe said in his opening remarks at his confirmation hearing, held under social distancing rules, with most of the senators and staff wearing masks. “Above all, my fidelity and loyalty will always be to the constitution and rule of law, and my actions as DNI will reflect that commitment.”
However Ratcliffe, a fiercely partisan congressman, dodged questions on which Trump has broken with his own intelligence briefers, such as whether there has been any progress towards North Korean disarmament (there has not) and whether Iran was in compliance with the 2015 nuclear deal when Trump pulled the US out of the agreement (it was).
Ratcliffe said that if confirmed, he would focus on the impact of coronavirus, questions about its origins in China and US competition with Beijing.
“I view China as the greatest threat actor right now,” he said. “Look with respect to Covid-19 and the role China plays; the race to 5G; cybersecurity issues: all roads lead to China,” he told the panel.
Ratcliffe withdrew his first nomination five days after Trump first named him as a candidate – to widespread surprise – last July, after it was found he had grossly overstated his national security experience.
He had falsely claimed on his website to have “arrested over 300 illegal immigrants in a single day” and had “put terrorists in prison” although he had not tried a terrorism case in his time as a US attorney.
“I don’t see what has changed since last summer … when the president decided not to proceed with your nomination over concerns about your inexperience, partisanship and past statements that seemed to embellish your record,” the ranking Democrat on committee, Senator Mark Warner, said on Tuesday.
However the committee chair, Senator Richard Burr, and the other Republicans on the panel, indicated they would back Ratcliffe’s nomination and quickly put it to a vote in the full Senate, despite a legal requirement that the DNI “shall have extensive national security expertise”.
“The Democrats in the committee and the Senate seem strongly opposed, but Ratcliffe seems likely to secure confirmation, probably on a party-line vote,” said Carl Tobias, a University of Richmond law professor.
Tobias suggested that Ratcliffe’s promises to be objective may have assuaged doubters on the committee, or that Burr’s standing and independence may have been weakened after he was found to have sold hundreds of thousands of dollars in stocks in mid-February, a few days after publishing a commentary for Fox News claiming that the US was “better prepared than ever before” to confront the virus.
Katrina Mulligan, a former official who worked for more than 10 years in the office of the director of national intelligence (ODNI), suggested another factor that has changed since last summer could be that the Senate is eager to replace the current acting DNI, Richard Grenell, another partisan with even less experience than Ratcliffe and who is not answerable to Congress because he is not confirmed in the role.
Mulligan added that US intelligence officials may be resigned to Ratcliffe getting the top job for similar reasons.
“The morale at ODNI is so low right now and people are so fearful, that I think that there is a real sense that it could be worse,” she said. “There’s this sense that at least he can form coherent sentences, and at least he has a modicum of experience which the current acting DNI really did not.”