The US President-elect Donald Trump has declared that he has chosen his longtime associate and ex-Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe to be the director of the CIA.
Trump reported this on the TruthSocial social network.
Trump himself described Ratcliffe as a "fighter for truth and honesty before the American public" and mentioned the "fake Russian conspiracy that was an operation of the Clinton campaign."
We are talking about the situation when in 2020, while serving as the head of intelligence, Ratcliffe publicly released unverified information about Russiaʼs influence on the 2016 presidential election.
The official then declassified a summary of a Russian intelligence assessment of Trumpʼs 2016 election rival Hillary Clinton. It alleged that Clinton approved a campaign plan to "inflame scandal" against Trump by linking him to Russia and the hacking of the Democratic National Committeeʼs servers.
Releasing the documents weeks before the 2020 election, Ratcliffe acknowledged that intelligence had not determined whether the Russian reports were accurate or perhaps even fabricated.
Intelligence officials opposed the release of unverified Russian documents on precisely these grounds. Democrats accused Ratcliffe of seeking to politicize the intelligence services in order to influence the presidential election.
He currently co-chairs the Center on American Security at the America First Policy Institute, a Trump-aligned think tank.
Who Trump chooses for his team
Trump is gradually assembling his team in the White House. On November 11, he announced that he had chosen Elise Stefanik, a representative of the Republican Party, for the post of the US ambassador to the United Nations.
On November 12, Trump officially appointed Republican Mike Waltz as his national security adviser.
Tesla and Space X founder Elon Musk and millionaire Vivek Ramaswamy, who ran for president in the Republican primary, will lead the new US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
For the position of the head of the Pentagon, Trump proposes Pete Hegseth, a presenter of Fox News and a veteran of the US army who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. And the Republican plans to appoint South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem as the head of the Department of Homeland Security.
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