Exclusive — Trump’s CIA Director John Ratcliffe: John Brennan’s ‘Tenure One of Worst Things That Ever Happened to Agency,’ Need to Depoliticize Intelligence

President Donald Trump’s newly confirmed Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director, John Ratcliffe, told Breitbart News exclusively that he views his mission as restoring the world’s most preeminent intelligence agency to its core primary objectives and undoing the lasting damage that one of his predecessors, John Brennan, did to the CIA.

“It would be fair to say his tenure was one of the worst things that has ever happened to the Agency,” Ratcliffe told Breitbart News of Brennan on Thursday in his first interview as CIA director.

Ratcliffe, who served as Director of National Intelligence (DNI) in Trump’s first term, was just confirmed Thursday afternoon as Trump’s new director of the CIA and sworn in shortly thereafter. He sat for his interview as CIA director on Thursday with Breitbart News, a broad and wide-ranging conversation that focused on the challenges that face the Intelligence Community (IC) as a whole, the CIA in particular, and how he views his role in terms of helping Trump execute his agenda. Ratcliffe also covered several major world theaters, from China to Russia to the Middle East, in this interview. But his very harsh criticism of Brennan, whose security clearance was just revoked by Trump along with the other 51 intelligence officials who falsely claimed Hunter Biden’s laptop was a product of Russian disinformation, is sure to make major news and marks a totally new era being ushered in at the CIA.

“There are challenges within the Intelligence Community and skepticism, I guess,” Ratcliffe told Breitbart News. “It’s because the American people saw examples of that. They saw the FBI misuse intelligence authorities at the FISA courts to spy on the Trump campaign. They saw through my declassification when I was DNI notes that the Intelligence Community knew in the summer of 2016 that Hillary Clinton had funded the Steele Dossier but yet it resulted in the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane and the Mueller investigation and the whole Russia collusion hoax. Then in 2020 they saw Brennan, [James] Clapper, and others amplify this lie that Adam Schiff started about Hunter Biden’s laptop being a Russian disinformation operation when everyone related to that did know and understand that there was no intelligence that supported that. Ultimately the FBI and Department of Justice used that laptop at the central piece of evidence in the prosecution of Hunter Biden and his guilty plea.”

Asked if former President Joe Biden pardoning his son, Hunter Biden, weeks before he left office and then doing the same for several of his family members in his final moments as president on Monday confirmed once and for all that the Biden family is corrupt and the critics are correct, Ratcliffe said it did. “Absolutely — it’s verification of that,” Ratcliffe said.

Ratcliffe said he also believes one of his main tasks as CIA director is to get the Agency “back to its core mission” and cut out the political nonsense that Brennan started back during President Barack Obama’s administration.

“So I do think the challenge is one of my focuses has to be not only to get the CIA back to its core mission and the things that it’s supposed to do like being the best foreign intelligence agency and collecting human intelligence and being objective in the analysis of that intelligence and conducting covert action as directed by the president and authorized by the president and only by the president, and then the counterintelligence mission of keeping America’s national security information safe — all of those things will remain the same,” Ratcliffe said. “But restoring the public’s confidence in the Intelligence Community, particularly the CIA, in the ability to do that. I talked about that in the confirmation process and how I would go about that. The number one thing is to move away from the things that have contributed to all of the failures and all of the mistakes and all of the lapses that we just talked about—the politicization of intelligence, and it really started under the tenure of John Brennan.”

Ratcliffe said that Brennan’s well-publicized efforts to “modernize” the CIA actually ended up hurting the agency in retrospect, and he will be spending a lot of time undoing the damage Brennan did to the CIA.

“His so-called ‘modernization’ of the CIA when he was director was in fact a politically motivated, bureaucratically imposed social justice agenda,” Ratcliffe told Breitbart News of Brennan. “The immediate impact of that and effect of that was that from that point forward every metric of success was that the CIA performed less well. The agency collected less intelligence, it was lower quality intelligence, and it was increasingly politicized in the analysis of that intelligence. That carried on throughout his tenure and then even after his tenure as we just talked about the timing of the letter of the 51 spies who lied was really the capstone of a career of politicizing intelligence. President Trump wants that to stop. He wants me to return the CIA to a meritocracy that produces better intelligence and addresses the kind of intelligence failures we talked about and things we’ve seen recently like with regard to Afghanistan, the assessments in Ukraine, the failure to see the October 7 Hamas talks, and now just a few weeks ago the fall of Syria. All of those things are because we haven’t done what we’re supposed to be doing to inform policymakers to make good decisions. Good decisions are hostage to good information and good intelligence and we’ve got to get back to that, so that’s the mandate from President Trump. As you know, my priorities will be his priorities. He makes the policy and I provide, as his CIA director, good intelligence to make that policy whatever it is. He needs good intelligence to end the war in Ukraine. He needs good intelligence to counter China’s moves in the Taiwan Strait or to hold them accountable with regard to COVID. He needs good intelligence to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon and from their ability to fund terrorism throughout the Middle East. That’s what it’s all about and I’m excited about the opportunity to do it and I’m confident that we’ll do exactly that.”

Asked to further flesh out what went wrong with Obama’s CIA Director, Ratcliffe said that his well-documented radicalism—Brennan proudly acknowledged once voting for the Communist Party candidate for president—combined his devotion to radical social justice insanity rather than meritocracy severely hurt the Agency’s reputation in the long term. Ratcliffe said that he and Trump have discussed how to fix that, and undo that damage and return the CIA to a meritocracy where regardless of somebody’s background their qualifications and accomplishments determine their success.

“You start with someone whose political history involved voting for a member of the Communist Party,” Ratcliffe said. “So many people were surprised that President Obama chose him to be director in the first place, but we just walked through how what the CIA and the Intelligence Community should do is to be completely apolitical and to not let politics infect intelligence products. That’s where mistakes happen, that’s where lapses in judgment happen, and that’s where Americans lose their lives. So we just talked about how, when you move away from that and you move toward a social justice agenda where people move up because they check certain boxes, that’s something that we’re demonstrating isn’t going to be tolerated. So, the ending of DEI across all federal offices included the Central Intelligence Agency. I say this, under President Trump and under me at the CIA, someone’s race, color, creed, religion, sexual orientation and preference shouldn’t inhibit anyone’s success but nor should it be an entitlement to success or advancement. In many cases, that is what happened and what has happened so we’re going back to a true meritocracy where everyone in the federal government can go as high and as far as their abilities can carry them and that’s what should be the metrics of success.”

Much more, including in-depth discussion about China and Artificial Intelligence, from Ratcliffe’s first interview as CIA director is forthcoming soon.