And Ratcliffe — an intel greenhorn with only one year of experience on the House Intelligence Committee and a résumé that now includes serving on Trump’s impeachment team — is the epitome of what intelligence officers “reflexively” reject, said David Priess, a former CIA officer and daily intelligence briefer.

“Anyone who does not come with extensive intelligence experience is automatically and quickly viewed as a threat because of the risk of the politicization of intelligence,” Priess said.

Those concerns are particularly acute given the abrupt departure of Joseph Maguire, the acting director who was forced out of the job after his office briefed lawmakers on the intelligence community’s assessment of Russian interference in the 2020 presidential election.

It will be weeks before Ratcliffe’s confirmation process moves forward in the Senate, though there are no signs yet that any Republicans plan to oppose him as they did when Trump first tapped him for the job in July. Senators haven’t warmed to Ratcliffe, exactly — the White House’s strategy of placing Richard Grenell, the fiercely loyal ambassador to Germany who is seen as a nonstarter on Capitol Hill, in the acting director role seems to have forced their hand.

If confirmed, Ratcliffe will not only have to allay public concerns about the politicization of intelligence during an election year, he’ll also have to strike a delicate balance inside the administration between a demanding president seeking to rein in the “deep state” and intelligence agencies that have long resented and resisted any perceived overreach from ODNI.

“When ODNI was first created, some of its proponents harbored grand ambitions, believing that the DNI could forcefully herd the 17 cats that make up the modern Intelligence Community,” said David Kris, a former assistant attorney general for DOJ’s national security division and a founder of Culper Partners.

But Kris said the role had since evolved, with subsequent DNIs focusing more on day-to-day bureaucratic issues, interagency coordination, and, sometimes, providing support in political battles.

John McLaughlin, who was serving as acting CIA director when the ODNI was established, initially opposed the concept when it was being debated in 2003-2004.

But, he said in an interview, the office “went through an evolution from 2004 through four directors,” reaching maximum effectiveness under James Clapper, who served as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and the director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency before taking over as DNI in 2010.

“Clapper figured out the secret,” McLaughlin said. “Let the agencies do their jobs and do only the things that the DNI alone is empowered (and authorized by the president) to do — mainly shaping the budget, coordinating tasking, briefing the president and Congress.”

How a Ratcliffe-led ODNI will view its responsibilities, however—and how Trump will empower the office as he seeks to tighten his grip on the intelligence community—is anyone’s guess.

The issue is particularly fraught given Russia’s continued interference in the presidential election, Trump’s reluctance to engage with his advisers on Russia’s malign activities, and the president's reported anger over Maguire’s willingness to brief congressional Democrats on the ongoing meddling.

What vexes intelligence veterans most, Priess said, is the prospect that a partisan director like Ratcliffe might take an active role in managing the President’s Daily Brief instead of letting analysts do their job — substituting his personal opinions for the consensus view of the $70-plus billion intelligence community.

“That's the kind of thing that could prompt resignations of senior officials within the agencies,” Priess said, noting Ratcliffe’s status as an outsider will make it more difficult to establish trust with the career officials.

Another concern “that’s not discussed nearly enough” is the role of ODNI’s legislative affairs office, a former senior intelligence official said.

“All of the legislative affairs offices in the intelligence community coordinate with, and often work through, ODNI legislative affairs,” the former official said. “So with a very partisan DNI, there could be some risk that you end up with a partisan shaping of what information goes to Congress.”

The risk is there even without a partisan leader. Maguire pushed to cancel a public worldwide threats briefing to Congress earlier this year because he did not want senior intelligence officials to be seen on-camera as disagreeing with the president on big issues such as Iran, Russia or North Korea, sources told POLITICO.

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Still, the DNI indisputably plays a key role as a liaison between the intelligence community and lawmakers.

David Gompert, who served as acting DNI after the resignation of Dennis Blair in 2009, said he spent “a lot of time up on the Hill” in the role.

“When it came to delivering deliberative, authoritative, and sometimes the most sensitive information to Congress, the relationship between the DNI and the House and Senate Intelligence committees was really, really critical,” Gompert said. “They depended enormously on the DNI.”

That may be why lawmakers are generally proceeding with caution on Ratcliffe, with Republican senators offering only tepid support and Democrats criticizing his lack of qualifications. Democrats, however, are also facing the prospect of something they may fear even more than a Ratcliffe appointment: that Grenell could remain in the acting DNI role indefinitely.

“I don’t think anybody changed their opinion of John Ratcliffe. What changed was the pathway to get somebody confirmed,” Senate Intelligence Chairman Richard Burr told Politico on Monday. “If Democrats want to vote against him and have Grenell stay on as acting until the end of the year, that’s fine with me.”

Grenell, who has been acting DNI for about two weeks, has already reshaped the office at the top: He brought in another Trump loyalist, Kash Patel, to serve as a senior adviser, and the office’s chief of staff, Viraj Mirani, and principal executive Andrew Hallman were told to leave their positions immediately despite offering to stay on and help with the transition.

In the end, the president is entitled to choose someone he or she is comfortable with to lead the intelligence community, McLaughlin said. But “it is equally important that the person be able to, and is expected to, view and report interdependently and objectively on events without political influence,” he noted. “Otherwise, there's no point to it.”

