John Ratcliffe, President Trump’s nominee for Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), addressed the Senate Intelligence Committee today, laying out his qualifications, vision, and strategies to tackle what he described as an unprecedented array of global threats.
TRANSCRIPT:
“Thank you very much, Chairman Cotton, Vice Chairman Warner, and distinguished members of the committee, for the opportunity to appear before you as the President’s nominee for the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. I’ve enjoyed meeting with each of you individually, and I look forward to answering your questions today.
Thank you to my friend and mentor, former Attorney General John Ashcroft, for being here today and for his gracious and humbling remarks. Sir, I am forever grateful for your faith in me.
Thank you to Director Burns and your excellent team at the CIA for your commitment to a smooth and professional transition. I’d like to recognize my amazing family: my wonderful wife, Michelle; our two daughters, Reilly and Darby; my five brothers and sisters; and, watching from above, my parents, Bob and Cathy Ratcliffe.
I simply have no words to adequately express my gratitude to all of you. Finally, thank you, President Trump, for the great honor of nominating me to lead the world’s premier intelligence agency. I am grateful for the opportunity to serve under you once again.
If confirmed, I will work tirelessly to help you protect the American people and advance America’s interests. Today, we face what may be the most challenging national security environment in our nation’s history.
The Chinese Communist Party remains committed to dominating the world economically, militarily, and technologically. Transnational criminal organizations are flooding American communities with violence and deadly narcotics.
The Russia-Ukraine war wages on, spreading devastation and increasing the risk of the United States being pulled into a conflict with a nuclear power.
The Iranian regime and its terrorist proxies continue to export mayhem across the Middle East, and Iran is closer to nuclear breakout than ever before. North Korea remains a destabilizing force.
Increasing coordination among America’s rivals and adversaries threatens to compound the threats they each pose to us individually. Numerous terrorist groups and other non-state actors, some of which have even crossed our southern border, still pose a persistent threat to our people and our homeland. These threats converge at a time of rapid technological change.
Emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and quantum computing will define the future of national security, geopolitical power, and human civilization. Ubiquitous technical surveillance is presenting unprecedented challenges to one of the CIA’s core missions: collecting human intelligence.
In short, the challenges are great and increase the necessity of confirming a CIA director who is prepared on day one to take them head-on.
For roughly a quarter of a century, I have devoted my professional life to U.S. national security. I served as the Chief of Anti-Terrorism and National Security, and then U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Texas.
As a congressman, I was a member of the House Intelligence, Homeland Security, and Judiciary Committees.
As Director of National Intelligence, I had the privilege of working closely with President Trump and oversaw the 18 agencies of the U.S. intelligence community, including the agency I now have the honor of being nominated to lead. In each of these roles, I served with fidelity to the Constitution and a strict adherence to the rule of law.
I have always prioritized American civil liberties, something I will continue to do if confirmed to serve again. Each of these experiences has shaped me as a leader and national security professional.
Together, they have prepared me to steer the CIA through a tumultuous time in the world and toward a future in which the CIA’s mission will be both more difficult and more indispensable than ever before. If confirmed, my leadership at CIA will focus on setting and communicating priorities and demanding relentless execution. Above all, there will be a strict adherence to the CIA’s mission.
We will collect intelligence, especially human intelligence, in every corner of the globe, no matter how dark or difficult. We will produce insightful, objective, all-source analysis, never allowing political or personal biases to cloud our judgment or infect our products.
We will conduct covert action at the direction of the President, going places no one else can go and doing things no one else can do.
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.
If it doesn’t, then it’s time to find a new line of work. We must be the ultimate meritocracy.
I will unapologetically empower the most talented, hardest-working, and most courageous risk-takers and innovators to protect the American people and advance America’s interests. I will not tolerate anything or anyone that distracts from our mission.
It would be inappropriate in an unclassified setting for me to discuss in detail some of my views on intelligence collection priorities, but I’m happy to do so in the classified hearing that will follow this one. However, if confirmed, there are several organizational priorities that I plan to focus on that I’d like to discuss here.
The first is talent. As you are all no doubt aware, the CIA has a remarkably low turnover rate among its workforce. This shows the CIA’s success in attracting mission-focused public servants who find deep meaning and value in the unique work they’re privileged to do every day.
But in some cases, it also suggests that complacency is tolerated. High performers hate nothing more than mediocrity, and nothing poisons a high-performance workplace culture more than leaders who don’t hold team members accountable when they don’t meet expectations.
The CIA must be a place that incentivizes and rewards meaningful contributions to our nation’s security and holds accountable low performers and bad actors who are not focused on our mission.
It has been said that the CIA’s World War II predecessor, the OSS, described its ideal recruit as a PhD who could win a bar fight. 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. I will also work to develop pathways for mid-career professionals with highly sought-after skills to fill gaps in the agency’s workforce and for CIA officers to do rotations in the private sector that broaden their perspectives.
I am committed to protecting and supporting CIA’s workforce. We will fully investigate workforce health and wellness issues, including anomalous health incidents.
Our officers must embrace a culture of tough readiness and resilience, but we must also be clear that when they put themselves in harm’s way, we will make sure they are taken care of when they return home.
We owe that to America’s men and women in uniform, and we owe it to the silent carriers who risk their lives in the shadows as well. Altogether, these talent strategies will be particularly important in addressing another organizational priority that I will focus on: technology.
At the CIA, technology is both a tool and a target. As a tool, technology is baked into nearly every facet of the agency, from the spy gadgets imagined and created by the Directorate of Science and Technology and used by the Directorate of Operations, to the cyber capabilities deployed by the Directorate of Digital Innovation, to the Directorate of Support using new technology tools to support our workforce, and the AI-powered large language models used by the Directorate of Analysis.
But over the decades, as technological innovation has shifted more and more from the public sector to the private sector, the CIA has struggled to keep pace.
As a target, technology is more important than ever, whether it’s understanding our adversaries’ capabilities in AI and quantum computing, their developments in hypersonics and emerging space technologies, or their innovations in counterintelligence and surveillance.
The recent creation of the agency’s Transnational and Technology Mission Center was an acknowledgment of that fact, but much more has to be done because our adversaries—and one in particular that I will discuss now—understand that the nation who wins the race of emerging technologies today will dominate the world of tomorrow.
This brings me to the need for the CIA to continue and increase in intensity the focus on the threats posed by China and its ruling Chinese Communist Party. As DNI, I dramatically increased the intelligence community’s resources devoted to China.
I openly warned the American people that from my unique vantage point as an official who saw more intelligence than anyone else, I assessed that China was far and away our top national security threat.
President Trump has been an incredible leader on this issue, and it is encouraging that a bipartisan consensus has emerged in recent years. The recent creation of the CIA’s China Mission Center is an example of the good work that must continue.
In closing, the agency must provide the President and U.S. policymakers with the best possible intelligence to inform their decision-making in hopes of preserving peace and spreading prosperity.
This is our once-in-a-generation challenge. The intelligence is clear.
Our response must be clear as well. I’m honored for the opportunity to appear before you today, and I thank you for your consideration of my nomination to be the Director of the CIA. I look forward to answering your questions.”
WATCH: CIA Director Nominee @JohnRatcliffe‘s full opening remarks: pic.twitter.com/6UX5lOnoIQ
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) January 15, 2025
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