John Ratcliffe has mired the agency in politics and possible illegality
September 10
ON SEPTEMBER 18, THE CIA turns 79. Whether it reaches 80 with its integrity intact depends largely on the man who leads it. In an administration of amateurs, talk-show hosts, and relatives, CIA Director John Ratcliffe stands out by not standing out. He does not sound unhinged and has no obvious grift. Next to a former director of national intelligence whose guru scripted her talking points, an FBI director who chugged beer with the U.S. Olympic hockey team, and an acting DNI who used mortgage-fraud referrals against the president’s enemies, the CIA director looks reassuringly normal.
But normal is the wrong test. A CIA director must be measured against the office’s demands: independence, intellectual honesty, and willingness to tell a president what he does not want to hear. We spent decades at the agency—one running clandestine operations abroad, the other writing analysis and briefing presidents, including this one. We took the same oath as Ratcliffe: to defend the Constitution, not a president’s agenda or grievances.
By that standard, John Ratcliffe is failing.
By undermining the independence and credibility of an apolitical intelligence service, Ratcliffe is doing serious damage to national security. He has repeatedly used the agency’s authority and prestige to validate President Trump’s conspiracy theories: that Russia’s help in 2016 was a Democratic “hoax,” and that China “stole” the election in 2020. His misuse of declassification dates to 2020, when, as director of national intelligence, he publicly released unverified Russian intelligence about Hillary Clinton, even conceding that it might “reflect exaggeration or fabrication.”
Declassification can serve legitimate ends, such as exposing misconduct or warning allies, as the United States did before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. But a government need not fabricate documents to tell a false story. It can release fragments, suppress context, and elevate disputed raw reporting over the analysis that interprets it. This is intelligence by collage: fragments assembled into the picture the president wants.
The country watched this on July 16, when Trump declared that China had conducted “the largest compromise of election data in history” and that the deep state “worked to actively suppress and downplay” it. Trump claimed that troves of recently declassified documents would prove his claims. What the documents actually proved was that the allegations were unfounded. This is the administration’s signature move: announce the conspiracy at full volume, then release evidence that fails to support it. The White House had bundled declassified memos with unrelated facts into “bombshell evidence” of “deep state suppression.” Election deniers proclaimed that CIA had validated their darkest theories.
The release’s centerpiece was a CIA note titled “Sensitive PRC Reporting from 2018-2020.” The memo appeared purpose-built to support the president’s allegations, with no visible author, serial number, sourcing, or date. By contrast, the Venezuela note that Ratcliffe declassified the same month was produced under the deputy director for analysis: dated, attributed, caveated—and inconvenient. It found that Caracas could not “manipulate the outcome of an election outside of Venezuela.”
A comforting story holds that Ratcliffe is the adult in the room. But the day of Trump’s speech claiming a Chinese election conspiracy theory, a CIA spokesperson said Ratcliffe had been “forward leaning in support of the President’s transparency effort,” and Ratcliffe said that he had “long publicly highlighted China’s nefarious efforts to influence the 2020 election against President Trump.” Weeks later, a CIA spokesperson insisted that “career senior intelligence officials were involved in every step.” In other words, despite the Trump administration’s claims to have unearthed a deep state conspiracy, they had actually created one. Ratcliffe knows better. He was director of national intelligence on January 7, 2021, when the intelligence community reported that no foreign actor had attempted to alter “any technical aspect of the voting process.” He dissented, but neither his memo nor the minority view he backed claimed Beijing altered a single vote.
He applied the same method to his 2025 review of the 2016 CIA assessment on Russian interference. Despite his claim of politicization of intelligence that was “unprecedented in American history” by the Obama administration, his review found nearly the opposite: “strong adherence to tradecraft standards” and analytic rigor exceeding most of the community’s work. The findings hardly justified the press tour—or the criminal investigation of a former CIA director—that followed.
Ratcliffe’s politicization, however, goes far beyond selective and misleading declassification. On his watch, a serving CIA officer was publicly named and pushed out, other intelligence officials were fired for speaking truth to power, and decade-old analysis was retracted because the administration didn’t like the topics.
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THE SILENCES ARE AS TELLING as the statements. In January, then-Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard stood beside FBI agents seizing 2020 ballots in Fulton County, Georgia. Ratcliffe said nothing. When Gabbard declassified a disputed report on the Russia investigation, he volunteered that he “strongly supports the public release.”
Worse, he has allowed the White House to misuse the CIA to tell Americans their votes were stolen. It is the latest blow to the post–Church Committee wall between the agency and domestic politics, and Congress has mostly just watched.
Politicization becomes self-enforcing. CIA analysts will learn which conclusions are rewarded and which end careers, if they haven’t already. A generation of irreplaceable officers—many of them mentors who teach young officers to hold the line—has already left.
What makes a credible intelligence chief is not whether he agrees with the president. It is how he acts when the intelligence does not. Richard Helms refused to support President Nixon’s Watergate coverup. Dan Coats publicly reaffirmed the intelligence community’s Russia assessment after Trump contradicted it. Ratcliffe, by contrast, posts partisan slights on X.
Just as disturbing, Ratcliffe has reportedly enlisted the CIA in lethal operations of dubious legality against suspected narcotics traffickers. The failures are connected: an agency bent to a president’s narrative can be bent to his operations.
The military’s overt campaign has killed at least 227 people in 68 strikes on boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. Last month, the Washington Post reported that a string of unexplained attacks on Ecuadorian fishing boats near the Galápagos Islands—which no government has acknowledged and the Pentagon denies conducting—was carried out under a covert CIA program. One vessel, the Fiorella, vanished in January with eight crew aboard; they have not been found. Survivors from two other boats describe drones dropping explosives, and armed, English-speaking men wearing American flag patches who bound, hooded, and interrogated them, and handed them off in El Salvador.
If the reporting is accurate, Ratcliffe presides over an unacknowledged, deadly campaign in which unidentified American personnel or contractors have seized foreign nationals on the high seas, and may have killed fishermen with no demonstrated connection to trafficking. Covert action exists so a president can pursue national objectives deniably abroad—not so a director can escape accountability for lethal force. The intelligence committees, whose oversight is the constitutional price of that secrecy, must demand answers. We have seen this movie before—the CIA will be dragged deeper into activity that will mire junior officers in years of investigations while their political masters enjoy presidential pardons.
Some believe that the banal Ratcliffe is preferable to anyone else Trump might nominate to lead the CIA. But it’s hard to see how any other Trump appointee would be different in substance—rather than in style—from Ratcliffe. By letting the CIA be conscripted into potentially illegal operations and Trump’s campaign to rewrite 2016 and 2020 election history, Ratcliffe is damaging the institution he was appointed to lead. He is not protecting the CIA from politicization; he is leading the politicization.
The CIA director isn’t responsible just for the collection, analysis, and dissemination of intelligence. The job also involves being the steward of the agency, so that future decision-makers will have the best intelligence to work from, and so that future Americans—and others—will be willing to sacrifice for our national security.
A grim way for the CIA to mark its 79th birthday. It deserves better—and so does the country it serves.
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John Sipher is a nonresident senior fellow at the Michael V. Hayden Center at George Mason University and a host of the podcast “Mission Implausible.” He worked for the Central Intelligence Agency’s clandestine service for 28 years.
Julia Curlee is a Public Service Fellow at Lawfare and a former CIA analyst with 25 years of experience in national security. She served as a National Security Council director in the Biden and second Trump White Houses and as a President’s Daily Brief briefer to Vice President Mike Pence.
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