How Far Is John Ratcliffe Willing to Go?

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

93% : Shortly after the 2020 election, Trump offered Ratcliffe the job that he had long wanted, and that his friend Trey Gowdy had said he was perfect for: attorney general.
72% : "In Washington, Ratcliffe discovered the full extent of his talents, which included a lawyerly facility for constructing political narratives that appealed to Republicans.
69% : Read: Don't let the Russia probe become the new BenghaziRatcliffe's performances impressed Trump.
61% : The then-ambassador to Germany was also serving as the acting intelligence director when Trump nominated Ratcliffe for the second time, in 2020.
55% : In November, Trump nominated Ratcliffe for an even more important job than the previous one: CIA director.
53% : Trump nominated him again in 2020, and he was narrowly confirmed along party lines, 49-44.
50% : After 9/11, the attorney general oversaw and approved controversial applications of the PATRIOT Act and other new authorities, including secret wiretapping of phone calls involving Americans.
49% : But to Trump and some of his advisers, the memo had a certain expedience.
49% : "As I think you've all learned, the intelligence agencies have run amok," Trump told reporters.
45% : In late September 2020, weeks before voters would choose between Trump and Joe Biden, Ratcliffe declassified and released the CIA memo, along with some notes from an intelligence briefing given to President Barack Obama.
43% : But their political ideas were shaped by forces that gave rise to Trump, not by the man himself.
37% : Some U.S. officials fear that Trump could direct the CIA to undertake illegal activities, such as aiding paramilitary forces inside the United States to secure the border, or clandestinely spying on Americans, knowing that the president would enjoy criminal immunity for official acts thanks to a recent Supreme Court opinion.
34% : FBI agents didn't need the CIA to tell them that Clinton was painting Trump as an ally of the Kremlin -- her campaign chair was on CNN saying just that.
34% : Read: Trump vs. the spies"It is imperative that the American people now learn what then-Vice President Joe Biden knew about this conspiracy and when he knew it," the Trump campaign's communications director said in a statement at the time.
33% : Though Trump has turned to Ratcliffe twice to "rein in" the deep state, his political origin story is actually rooted in the security state's expansion.
30% : These are extreme examples, and Trump would surely face internal resistance.
30% : Nothing angered Trump like talk of Russia trying to help him win an election.
28% : When Trump nominated Ratcliffe as the DNI in 2019, he gave him marching orders to "rein in" the forces that the president believed were undermining him.
28% : "Donald Trump is not above the law," he thundered.
27% : Ratcliffe's appeal to Trump has always been clear: He's a political operator willing to push the boundaries of a historically apolitical position in a manner that serves the president's interests.
21% : Trump was also making Clinton's case for her: In late July, he had publicly encouraged the Russians to hack her email, which they then tried to do.
20% : Also, officials warned, the Russians might have wanted that memo to be released; even four years on, anything mentioning Clinton, Russia, and Trump was politically combustible and potentially disruptive to the election.
18% : As for Ratcliffe, he has more fiercely defended Trump as a victim of an unfair system than championed him as a hero sent to fix it.
18% : According to an account in Michael Bender's book, Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost, Ratcliffe had privately told Trump that no intelligence suggested that foreign governments had hacked voting machines or changed the outcome of the election.
17% : Ashcroft was in many ways an architect of the powerful national-security bureaucracy that Trump and Ratcliffe now rail against.
12% : According to Russian intelligence sources, Hillary Clinton had approved a plan to publicly tie Donald Trump to the country's hack of the Democratic National Committee.
12% : Ratcliffe stuck to a theme of pernicious bias against Trump.
9% : "Trump himself made passing reference to the intelligence in his first debate with Biden, accusing Clinton of "a whole big con job" and the intelligence community of "spying on my campaign.
9% : Read: Trump calls out election meddling -- by ChinaWhen announcing Ratcliffe's nomination for CIA director, Trump indicated what he valued most in his pick: From "exposing" the Russia investigation as the alleged handiwork of the Clinton campaign to catching the FBI's abuse of Civil Liberties at the FISA Court, John Ratcliffe has always been a warrior for Truth and Honesty with the American public," Trump wrote in a social-media post.
3% : Gowdy, who left Congress in 2019, got on Trump's bad side for not embracing his conspiracy theories about Democrats spying on his campaign, and Scott competed against Trump in the GOP's 2024 presidential primary.
0% : Read: Ratcliffe's withdrawal reveals Trump still doesn't understand appointmentsWhen Trump named Ratcliffe as his pick for CIA director, he again made his expectations clear: He praised Ratcliffe for exposing alleged abuses by the FBI and former intelligence officials, and for showing "fake Russian collusion to be a Clinton campaign operation."

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.