President Donald Trump announced in a tweet Sunday that Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats would soon leave the administration and, in his place, the president will nominate Rep. John Ratcliffe, R-Texas, to replace Coats.
Coats, a former senator from Indiana, had not seen eye to eye with Trump on issues like Russian electoral interference and the president’s past blasting of the intelligence community. Administration officials told NBC News in March that Coats considered resigning last year over the rift but that Vice President Mike Pence persuaded him to stay on.
Late on Sunday, Ratcliffe tweeted that he was “deeply grateful” to Trump for “the opportunity to lead our Nation’s intelligence community and work on behalf of all the public servants who are tirelessly devoted to defending the security and safety of the United States.”
Vice President of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies at The Heritage Foundation and author of Wiki at War: Conflict in a Socially Networked World and Private Sector, Public Wars – Contractors in Combat, Lt Col James Carafano, offers his assessment of John Ratcliffe as Director of National Intelligence with Dan & Amy