Close Trump ally John Ratcliffe appointed CIA director; Kash Patel misses out on big-ticket posting

US President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday appointed ally John Ratcliffe to serve as the CIA director in his administration. Previously, it was widely reported that another Trump loyalist Kashyap 'Kash' Patel would be selected as the CIA chief. 

When talking about Ratcliffe's appointment, Trump mentioned the career highlights of his appointee in a statement. 

"From exposing fake Russian collusion to be a Clinton campaign operation, to catching the FBI's abuse of Civil Liberties at the FISA Court, John Ratcliffe has always been a warrior for Truth and Honesty with the American Public. When 51 intelligence officials were lying about Hunter Biden's laptop, there was one, John Ratcliffe, telling the truth to the American People," Trump said.

During the previous Trump administration, Ratcliffe served as the director of national intelligence, leading the US spy agencies during the COVID-19 pandemic.

John Ratcliffe was responsible for detecting and countering foreign efforts to interfere in American politics. Weeks before the 2020 presidential elections, he also participated in an unusual news conference. 

In this presser, he and other officials accused Iran of being responsible for emails intended to intimidate American voters. He also faced faced criticism for declassifying Russian intelligence that allegedly revealed information about Democrats during the 2016 election while acknowledging it might not be true. 

The move was decried by the Democrats as being a partisan stunt that politicised intelligence. This makes him a traditional pick for the job, which required Senate confirmation, when compared to Kash Patel.  

Even though John Ratcliffe was elected to the Congress in 2014, he become prominent as a staunch Trump defender in 2019 during the House's first impeachment proceedings against the former President. 

As a member of Trump's impeachment advisory team, Ratcliffe questioned witnesses during the impeachment hearings unsparingly. 

“This is the thinnest, fastest and weakest impeachment our country has ever seen,” Ratcliffe said after the Democratic-controlled House voted to impeach Trump over a phone call he had with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Just like Trump's National Security Advisor Micheal Waltz, Ratcliffe is a China hawk and has repeatedly sounded the alarm about Beijing. He went onto call China the top threat to US interests and the rest of the free world. 

Ratcliffe said in 2020 op-ed for The Wall Street Journal: "Many of China's major public initiatives and prominent companies offer only a layer of camouflage to the activities of the Chinese Communist Party."

(With inputs from The Associated Press)