John Ratcliffe: Senate confirms Trump's new intelligence chief on party-line vote

Senate confirms Texas congressman to be next director of national intelligence by vote of 49-44

The Senate has confirmed Texas Republican Congressman John Ratcliffe to be Donald Trump's director of national intelligence, which oversees various spying and national security operations.

Mr Ratcliffe was confirmed on a party-line 49-44 vote on Thursday and will replace Richard Grenell, the acting DNI who has headed the office since last summer.

Mr Ratcliffe will assume his role at a politically precarious time for the intelligence office, which has been declassifying materials related to the FBI's 2016 counterintelligence investigation into possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia and handing them over to Republican-controlled Senate committees that are investigating the Obama administration and former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumed 2020 Democratic presidential nominee.

At his confirmation hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee earlier this month, Mr Ratcliffe promised to "speak truth to power" and indicated his actions and intelligence reports won't be dictated by the whims of a mercurial president.

“Regardless of what anyone wants our intelligence to reflect, the intelligence I will provide if confirmed will not be altered or impacted by outside influence,” the incoming DNI said at that hearing.

Those promises were not enough to sway any Senate Democrats to vote for him, with many citing his prominent public allegiance to Mr Trump and his long history of partisanship in House committees with broad oversight authority. Mr Ratcliffe was assigned to the House Intelligence Committee for this Congress.

Democrats, along with a handful of Republicans, tanked Mr Ratcliffe's nomination to the same post last year amid concerns that he had dishonestly exaggerated his résumé and has less experience prosecuting terrorism cases than he let on during his first campaign for the House.

While Democrats did not vote to confirm Mr Ratcliffe, they could have delayed the vote on his nomination until June. But Mr Grenell, who took over for former DNI Dan Coats last August, is even more unpopular than Mr Ratcliffe.

Still, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer did not mince words when expressing his displeasure with Mr Ratcliffe's confirmation vote.

The DNI post "requires someone with unimpeachable integrity, deep experience, and the independence and backbone to speak truth to power. That's what Directors of National Intelligence, including the previous one, Dan Coats, did. Unfortunately, Mr. Ratcliffe doesn’t even come close to meeting that high bar," Mr Schumer said in his opening floor remarks on Thursday.

Republican leaders, meanwhile, were pleased to get Mr Ratcliffe confirmed without Democratic delays so they could continue to other matters — mostly confirming other Trump political appointments and filling federal judge positions.

"The President will have a Senate-confirmed DNI who can pursue the vital national-security work of our tireless Intelligence Community while also ensuring the IC stays out of politics and out of the papers," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said.

Mr Ratcliffe's new position will thrust him straight away into a politically fraught position: Republican chairmen of the Senate Finance, Judiciary, and Homeland Security Committees are probing multiple threads related to Obama-era intelligence community decisions and actions undertaken by Mr Biden when he was vice president with regard to Ukraine, and have been asking the office of the DNI for declassified materials.

The Democratic ranking members of those committees have scorned those investigations as partisan smear jobs with no merit or basis except the president's own unsubstantiated conspiracy theories.

"It is such a gross misuse of the power of the majority," Mr Schumer said earlier this week of Republicans' investigations.

"Senate Republicans are using their committees to hold fishing expeditions dictated by the president’s twitter feed, which even his supporters don't usually believe," the New York Democrat said.