page_title: John Ratcliffe (American politician)
section_title: Russia probe
hierarchical_section_title: John Ratcliffe (American politician) / Political positions / Russia probe
caption_attribution_description: English: President Donald Trump meets with the Republican Study Committee regarding healthcare in the Oval Office, Friday, March 17, 2017. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)
context_page_description: John Lee Ratcliffe is an American politician and attorney who is the Director of National Intelligence in the Trump administration. He previously served as the Representative for Texas's 4th district from 2015 to 2020. During his time in Congress, Ratcliffe was regarded as one of the most conservative members.
  President Donald Trump announced on July 28, 2019, that he intended to nominate Ratcliffe to replace Dan Coats as Director of National Intelligence. Ratcliffe withdrew after Republican senators raised concerns about him, former intelligence officials said he might politicize intelligence, and media revealed Ratcliffe's embellishments regarding his prosecutorial experience in terrorism and immigration cases.
  On February 28, 2020, President Trump announced that he would again nominate Ratcliffe to be Director of National Intelligence, and after Senate approval, he resigned from the House, and was sworn in on May 26.
context_section_description: Ratcliffe has staunchly supported Trump's criticism of the investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections, in particular the origins of the investigation, contending "it does appear that there were crimes committed during the Obama administration." Ratcliffe has stated that he has "seen no evidence" that Russian interference in the 2016 election helped get Trump elected. He has described court-approved surveillance of the Trump campaign as spying. He has claimed without evidence that the Russia probe may have been tainted by a criminal conspiracy.
  Days before he was announced as Trump's choice to be Director of National Intelligence, Ratcliffe drew headlines for his questioning of Robert Mueller during Mueller's congressional testimony. Ratcliffe criticized Mueller for describing instances of obstruction of justice in his report on Russian interference in the 2016 election. Ratcliffe claimed that Mueller went beyond the rules for special counsels, by covering instances of potential obstruction when the report did not charge any crimes. The Associated Press and PolitiFact found Ratcliffe's claim false, noting that special prosecutors are required by federal regulations to explain decisions not to prosecute. Neal Katyal, who wrote the special counsel regulations in 1999, called Ratcliffe "dead wrong."
  Ratcliffe also falsely claimed that the Steele dossier, which he described as a "fake, phony dossier", was the start of the Russia probe. The House Republican intelligence committee's own memo about the Russia probe had said that it was information about George Papadopoulos that set off an investigation by the FBI in July 2016. Ratcliffe also asserted that Democrats "accused Donald Trump of a crime and then tried to reverse engineer a process to justify that accusation." Trump was reportedly impressed by Ratcliffe's aggressive questioning of Mueller, which some sources described as Ratcliffe's "audition" to be named DNI.
  Shortly before Trump announced he would be nominated as DNI, Ratcliffe asserted the Obama administration had committed a felony by leaking classified transcripts of 2016 phone calls between Michael Flynn and Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak to The Washington Post. The gist of the conversations were conveyed to Post reporters, but not the transcripts themselves. He also asserted, "The Mueller report and its conclusions weren’t from Robert Mueller. They were written by what a lot of people believe was Hillary Clinton’s de facto legal team, people that had supported her, even represented some of her aides."
  Ratcliffe said that he had seen a text message between FBI employees Peter Strzok and Lisa Page that referenced a "secret society," adding, "We learned today about information that in the immediate aftermath of his election, there may have been a ‘secret society’ of folks within the Department of Justice and the FBI, to include Page and Strzok, working against [Trump].” His assertion briefly went viral on pro-Trump media, and the next day Republican senator Ron Johnson claimed that Republican investigators had learned from an “informant" of meetings of a “secret society.” The text message did contain the expression "secret society," but it was soon learned to be a joke related to Strzok's purchase of "beefcake" calendars of Vladimir Putin for distribution to FBI employees who had worked on the Russian investigation.
caption: Ratcliffe with President Donald Trump in 2017
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