Who is John Ratcliffe, former US spy tapped by Trump as CIA director?

US President-elect Donald Trump picked John Ratcliffe, a former Congressman who served as the director of national intelligence (DNI) during Trump’s first term, to lead the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
On his social media platform, Truth Social, Trump described Ratcliffe as a “warrior for truth and honesty with the American public.” Ratcliffe was also declared as the nation’s top spy in May 2020, eight months before Trump left office, news agency Reuters reported.
John Ratcliffe served as director of national intelligence during the closing months of Donald Trump’s first term, overseeing US intelligence agencies through the challenges of the COVID pandemic and facing foreign efforts to influence the 2020 US presidential polls.
With a background in intelligence, Ratcliffe presents a more conventional choice for the role — one that requires Senate confirmation — than some of the loyalists reportedly favoured by Trump’s allies.
As DNI, Ratcliffe was part of a rare, late-night news conference just weeks before the 2020 election, where he and other officials pointed to Iran as the source of a flood of emails intended to intimidate American voters.
Ratcliffe was subjected to criticism for declassifying Russian intelligence that suggested damaging information about Democrats from the 2016 election, even while he acknowledged the material was unverified. Democrats condemned the decision, calling it a partisan move that risked politicising the intelligence community.
He made headlines again weeks later when he dismissed claims from dozens of former intelligence officials who argued that emails from a laptop reportedly belonging to Hunter Biden, found at a Delaware computer repair shop, had the characteristics of a Russian disinformation operation.
Before his stint with the intelligence world, Ratcliffe served in Congress. He was elected to Congress in 2014; however, he caught the eyeballs in 2019 as a defender of Trump during the first impeachment proceedings against him.