Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director John Ratcliffe told Breitbart News in his first interview after being confirmed by the U.S. Senate on Thursday that he intends to immediately get to the bottom of what the Agency knows about COVID leaking from a Wuhan lab in China.
Ratcliffe was confirmed by the Senate Thursday and then sworn in by Vice President JD Vance as the newest director of the CIA. He spoke with Breitbart News on Thursday for his first exclusive interview, in which he laid out how he intends to reform the Agency to return the world’s preeminent intelligence service to its core mission and depoliticize it. He also ripped previous CIA director John Brennan, who led the Agency during former President Barack Obama’s administration, as being singularly responsible for steering it in the wrong direction.
When it comes to confronting the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Ratcliffe did not hold back.
“I know from conversations with the president about where his priorities are and where he wants things to be as it concerns foreign threats to America’s national security posture, and it starts with China,” Ratcliffe said. “One of the things that I’ve talked about a lot is addressing the threat from China on a number of fronts, and that goes back to why a million Americans died and why the Central Intelligence Agency has been sitting on the sidelines for five years in not making an assessment about the origins of COVID. That’s a day-one thing for me. I’ve been on record as you know in saying I think our intelligence, our science, and our common sense all really dictates that the origins of COVID was a leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. But the CIA has not made that assessment or at least not made that assessment publicly. So I’m going to focus on that and look at the intelligence and make sure that the public is aware that the agency is going to get off the sidelines.”
The CIA has been mired in controversy on this front for the past several years as a whistleblower alleged that Agency analysts who were tasked with determining how COVID originated were bribed to say it did not come from the Wuhan lab. Everyone agrees the virus came from China, but there has been disagreement as to whether it came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology or whether it spread from animals to humans in nature, though the lab leak theory has regained prominence if not dominance in recent years after originally being attacked. The CIA has still not taken a formal position on this, but with Ratcliffe at the helm, that is quite clearly going to change and soon.
Ratcliffe also mentioned to Breitbart News a joint op-ed he wrote with former Deputy Director of National Intelligence Cliff Sims for the Wall Street Journal on exactly this matter in September 2023:More broadly than just confronting China on COVID, Ratcliffe said his role will be arming President Donald Trump with the facts and intelligence he needs about China so that way when he negotiates and communicates with his counterpart in Beijing, Chinese President Xi Jinping, Trump has all the information he needs to succeed.
“As President Trump deals with President Xi, he needs to be armed with the very best intelligence and to be able to talk about China in a way that if they caused or contributed to the death of a million Americans, the president needs to be armed with that,” Ratcliffe said. “But countering China and its aggression is something I started as DNI. As you may recall, I did an op-ed along with Cliff Sims that highlighted the threat from China at the time. You may remember that I got criticized for being political and saying that I was out-sizing the threat from China. Well, fast forward four years later, the FBI director says in his exit interview that China is the biggest threat of our generation and gets praised for saying that. Well, we were saying that four years ago. So, really putting the focus on that and continuing that is really going to be something President Trump needs.”
Ratcliffe also said he believes the U.S. foreign policy and intelligence establishment has been behind the times in understanding the threats China poses to the U.S., in part because they are built for fighting a Cold War with Russia that they already won decades ago and also in part because of the CCP’s use of spreading around cash to major institutions in America. He said Trump wants him to prepare the CIA to truly position the U.S. for the 21st century on this front and catch up with the fact that China — not Russia — is the biggest geopolitical threat the United States faces.
“You have people who have been at the different intelligence agencies for so long and focused on the Russia threat — and, as you said, legitimately because [Vladimir] Putin is a bad guy and a regime with a huge nuclear stockpile that we need to talk about — but yeah, the Intelligence Community has been slow to adjust to the fact that China is the primary geopolitical threat we face,” Ratcliffe said. “It’s the second largest economy, and they compete with us across the board on a peer-to-peer basis in a way that Russia can’t, and I think there are reasons for that that are unfortunately — there’s a financial aspect to that. From Washington, DC, to Wall Street to Silicon Valley to Hollywood, there has been a desire to keep China from being labeled a bad guy because a lot of people make a lot of money from China and in China, and China has a lot of influence in all of those places. But our intelligence is clear —I saw that as DNI and now it’s inescapable for people to not see — on how sinister and nefarious the People’s Republic of China and its various arms of the Chinese Communist Party have been. So, we’ve been slow to adjust the focus, and it’s one of the things that the president needs and wants from us.”
More from Ratcliffe’s first interview as CIA director is forth
coming.