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Trump Wants Revenge for the Russia Investigation. The Administration Is Going After a Familiar Face. [View all]
CIA Director John Ratcliffe is using his position to go after President Donald Trump’s domestic critics.
It is bad enough, though not uncommon, for an agency head to politicize intelligence—to cherry-pick information or contort facts and analyses to fit the perceptions and policies of the president. George W. Bush’s CIA director, George Tenet, did this to bolster the White House view that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. And Ratcliffe himself indulged in it during the brief spell when he was director of national intelligence at the end of Trump’s first term.
However, it is a betrayal of the agency’s charter, a demolition of its overall credibility, and by the way not at all common, for a director to harness the agency’s assets to prop up the president’s image and wreck the reputations of individuals who dare tarnish it.
Late last month, Ratcliffe publicly released a “tradecraft review” of the intelligence community’s assessment in 2016, during the final days of Barack Obama’s presidency, which had concluded that Russian President Vladimir Putin interfered in that year’s U.S. election in order to help Trump win.
In an exclusive interview with the New York Post, which was picked up by other news agencies, Ratcliffe said the review showed claims of Russian tampering in the election were strictly political. Accusing the former president and his FBI Director James Comey, DNI James Clapper, and CIA Director John Brennan, Ratcliffe told the pro-Trump New York tabloid, “This was Obama, Comey, Clapper, and Brennan deciding, ‘We’re going to screw Trump.’ ” They “silenced all the career [intel] professionals and railroaded the process.”
It is bad enough, though not uncommon, for an agency head to politicize intelligence—to cherry-pick information or contort facts and analyses to fit the perceptions and policies of the president. George W. Bush’s CIA director, George Tenet, did this to bolster the White House view that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. And Ratcliffe himself indulged in it during the brief spell when he was director of national intelligence at the end of Trump’s first term.
However, it is a betrayal of the agency’s charter, a demolition of its overall credibility, and by the way not at all common, for a director to harness the agency’s assets to prop up the president’s image and wreck the reputations of individuals who dare tarnish it.
Late last month, Ratcliffe publicly released a “tradecraft review” of the intelligence community’s assessment in 2016, during the final days of Barack Obama’s presidency, which had concluded that Russian President Vladimir Putin interfered in that year’s U.S. election in order to help Trump win.
In an exclusive interview with the New York Post, which was picked up by other news agencies, Ratcliffe said the review showed claims of Russian tampering in the election were strictly political. Accusing the former president and his FBI Director James Comey, DNI James Clapper, and CIA Director John Brennan, Ratcliffe told the pro-Trump New York tabloid, “This was Obama, Comey, Clapper, and Brennan deciding, ‘We’re going to screw Trump.’ ” They “silenced all the career [intel] professionals and railroaded the process.”
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/07/russia-trump-james-comey-john-brennan-cia-john-ratcliffe-russiagate.html]
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