WATCH: Vice President JD Vance Swears in John Ratcliffe as CIA Director

By Nick Gilbertson

Vice President JD Vance swore in John Ratcliffe as CIA director Thursday night following his Senate confirmation.

• Ratcliffe breezed through the confirmation process with a 74-25 vote.

  

  “John is a great patriot, a guy who has the trust of the president, and I think really believes deeply in the mission, first of all, of keeping Americans safe but also doing it in a way that ensures that the American people have confidence in our national intelligence services,” Vance said ahead of administering the oath.

  The newly minted CIA director served as the director of national intelligence at the end of the first Trump administration. He represented Texas’s Fourth Congressional District in the House of Representatives from 2015 to 2020.

  Ratcliffe spoke with Breitbart News Washington Bureau Chief Matthew Boyle on Thursday in his first interview after being confirmed. Zoning in on China, Ratcliffe emphasized that a day-one priority is getting the agency to assess the cause of the coronavirus outbreak in 2019.

  “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,” he added.

  Speaking about China more generally, Ratcliffe underscored the importance of providing Trump with the best intelligence.

  “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,” he continued. “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.”