John Lee Ratcliffe[1] (born October 20, 1965) is an American politician and attorney who has served as the ninth director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) since 2025.

President Donald Trump announced on July 28, 2019, that he intended to nominate Ratcliffe to replace Dan Coats as director of national intelligence.

On February 28, 2020, Trump announced that he would again nominate Ratcliffe to be director of national intelligence, and after Senate approval, he resigned from the House, and was sworn in on May 26.

[6] Ratcliffe was elected to four consecutive two-year terms as mayor of Heath, Texas,[7] a city of about 7,000 people, 25 miles east of downtown Dallas.

[8] In 2004, president George W. Bush appointed Ratcliffe to be the chief of anti-terrorism and national security for the Eastern District of Texas, within the U.S. Department of Justice.

[10][11] Ratcliffe returned to private law practice when Rebecca Gregory was confirmed by the Senate as the permanent U.S. attorney for the district in April 2008.

[16] Ratcliffe also misrepresented his involvement in the U.S. v. Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing case, claiming “there are individuals that currently sit in prison because I prosecuted them for funneling money to terrorist groups.

[18] Ratcliffe's official House of Representatives biography[19] says that while working as prosecutor for the Eastern District, he "arrested 300 illegal aliens in a single day".

[22][16][23] In 2012, Ratcliffe was part of a transition team, established before that year's general election by Republican candidate Mitt Romney, to vet potential Presidential appointees.

Hall was endorsed by the NRA Political Victory Fund, former congressman Ron Paul, former congresswoman Michele Bachmann, and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee.

[28] Ratcliffe defeated Hall with 53 percent of the vote,[28] the first time in twenty years that a sitting Republican congressman in Texas had been ousted in a primary.

On March 1, 2016, Ratcliffe easily defeated two challengers in the Republican primary, getting 68 percent of the vote, 47 percentage points ahead of the second-place finisher.

The Dallas Morning News said in April 2016 that "Ratcliffe's first term in Washington proves that freshman lawmakers can be players of consequence in Congress.

"[33] In a September 2016 hearing of the House Judiciary Committee, Ratcliffe questioned then-FBI director James Comey about whether the FBI's decision not to recommend criminal charges against Hillary Clinton in connection with the email controversy came before or after Clinton was interviewed by investigations; Comey responded that the final decision had been made after the interviews.

[47] President Donald Trump announced on July 28, 2019, that he intended to nominate Ratcliffe to replace Dan Coats as director of national intelligence.

[16][61] They expressed fear that with Ratcliffe as DNI, Trump would in effect be assuming personal control over the intelligence community, which would then be expected to tell him only what he wants to hear.

"[65][66] In his formal statement withdrawing from consideration, Ratcliffe said, "I do not wish for a national security and intelligence debate surrounding my confirmation, however untrue, to become a purely political and partisan issue.

Select Senate Committee on Intelligence held hearings on May 5, 2020, which started with a letter from former U.S. attorney general John Ashcroft in favor of the nomination.

[78] At the same time, several of his stances on foreign policy have since gained bipartisan support, including his early warnings about the threats posed to the U.S. by China's intelligence efforts.

[82] In March 2021, two months after Ratcliffe left as DNI, the ODNI released analysis finding that proxies of Russian intelligence promoted and laundered misleading or unsubstantiated narratives about the Bidens "to US media organizations, US officials, and prominent US individuals, including some close to former President Trump and his administration.

There, he was tasked with holding China accountable for the COVID-19 pandemic and "helping Project 2025 build out policy recommendations for intelligence reform in the next presidential administration".

[100][101] On January 25, the CIA revised its previous estimate of the origin of COVID-19 from "undecided" to "low confidence" in favor of a laboratory leak in Wuhan.

Former officials of the CIA have characterized this as disastrous for the United States' capacity to collect counterintelligence on foreign adversaries by having potentially compromised the identity of agents hired in the previous two years, who may now be deemed too risky to deploy.

[111] He called for China to be stripped of the rights to hold the 2022 Winter Olympics because of what he said were "crimes of humanity against Uyghur Muslims" and alleged "a massive cover up of the (COVID-19) virus’s origins" and the "circumstances surrounding its initial outbreak".

[124] Ratcliffe claimed that Mueller went beyond the rules for special counsels, by covering instances of potential obstruction when the report did not charge any crimes.

The Associated Press and PolitiFact found Ratcliffe's claim false, noting that special prosecutors are required by federal regulations to explain decisions not to prosecute.

[127] The House Republican intelligence committee's own memo about the Russia probe had said that it was information about George Papadopoulos that set off an investigation by the FBI in July 2016.

[123] Shortly before Trump announced he would be nominated as DNI, Ratcliffe asserted the Obama administration had committed a felony by leaking classified transcripts of 2016 phone calls between Michael Flynn and Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak to The Washington Post.

"[49] Three days after becoming DNI in May 2020, Ratcliffe declassified and released the full transcripts, which may have made it more difficult for prosecutors to assert the earlier reporting that the gist of the calls had harmed national security.

The text message did contain the expression "secret society," but it was soon learned to be a joke related to Strzok's purchase of "beefcake" calendars of Vladimir Putin for distribution to FBI employees who had worked on the Russian investigation.