John Ratcliffe is the CIA director under Donald Trump’s second term. John Kiriakou, a self-described “lifelong leftist,” says he probably disagrees with Ratcliffe on every issue but supports him anyway as a needed “bombthrower” to shake up the agency.[1] Kiriakou had predicted Ratcliffe would be confirmed as CIA director almost unanimously, noting Ratcliffe had briefly served as acting Director of National Intelligence in Trump’s first term and had previously been a Texas congressman on the armed services and intelligence committees, with no indication he intended to reform the CIA.[2] He came away from Mar-a-Lago early in the transition with the impression that Ratcliffe was “really the guy” on intelligence and national security in the incoming administration.[3]
Despite respecting Ratcliffe, Kiriakou doubts he has the wherewithal to meaningfully change the CIA from within — reasoning that if former director Bill Burns couldn’t do it, Ratcliffe likely can’t either.[4] His fuller diagnosis pairs a compliment with two structural obstacles: “Ratcliffe — good guy, expert in what he does. He’s not a visionary thinker.” And Trump is already a lame duck, against an institution whose leaders have been in place for twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five years and whose standing method is simply to wait a president out, as Kiriakou says they did with Carter, Clinton and Trump himself.[5][6]
Two directors competing for primacy
Kiriakou uses Ratcliffe to explain a structural drift in American intelligence. On paper the CIA director sits under the Director of National Intelligence; day to day, he says, that is simply not true, and which of them holds cabinet rank is the president’s choice among CIA director, DNI and ambassador to the United Nations. The office of the DNI was set up to coordinate all eighteen U.S. intelligence agencies, which in practice meant control of the budget — except that half those agencies belong to the Pentagon and answer to the Secretary of Defense.[7][8][9]
Over twenty years the DNI has absorbed more: the President’s Daily Brief used to be a CIA-only publication and is now a DNI one, and the major operational accounts — Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Russia, China — that were once solely the CIA’s now fall under the DNI. The result, in his phrase, is “almost as though we have two CIA directors who are competing with each other for primacy.”[9][10] Kiriakou’s verdict on who is winning is unambiguous — Ratcliffe over Tulsi Gabbard, “by far” — and he notes that Ratcliffe has avoided the public-relations troubles that dogged her.[11][10]
The neocon assessment
By 2026 Kiriakou’s characterization had hardened. Asked about the CIA’s alignment with Israeli rather than American interests, he cited Ratcliffe going to Trump and cutting out Gabbard and the administration’s other more moderate, non-interventionist voices in order to put Mossad-generated intelligence on Iran in front of the president — reporting that, he notes, is credited with persuading Trump to bomb the country.[12] “Ratcliffe, in my estimation, appears to be a neocon,” he says, placing him alongside Marco Rubio in a list that runs through the bombing of Iran, two carrier battle groups sent to the Gulf, and the removal of Saddam Hussein — each, in his account, at Israeli insistence.[13]
He gives one counterweight to that picture. In the reporting on the meeting that preceded the strikes, Ratcliffe is said to have called the Israeli plan “farcical” and “nonsense,” with Rubio putting it more coarsely, and both warning that Israel oversells because it cannot act without the United States. Trump went ahead anyway. Kiriakou’s own comment on that account: “I 100% believe it.”[14][15]
On Kiriakou’s pardon
Ratcliffe also figures directly in Kiriakou’s pardon campaign. In October 2025 Kiriakou reported that the CIA director had said the agency had no objection if the president chose to pardon him — “that’s a big deal” — alongside a one-sentence statement from Gabbard to the same effect.[16]
Kiriakou’s standing request
In 2026 Kiriakou disclosed that, having written a paper at a cabinet member’s request in connection with his pardon, he had attached a condition of his own: if Ratcliffe were to resign as director of the CIA — “even if it’s on the last day of the Trump presidency” — he wanted the job, for however briefly. “I want to be the one to walk in that hallway and say, ‘Guess who’s back?’ Even if it’s for one single day. But I’m not bitter.”[17]
Cast in a predicted back-door demand
Early in the second Trump administration, Kiriakou used Ratcliffe as a stand-in for the institutional pressure he expects any encrypted platform to face. Asked what happens when the administration demands a way in, he scripted the meeting: “can you imagine a White House meeting where Kash Patel, the new FBI director, or John Ratcliffe, the new CIA director, go to Trump and say, ‘Mr President, you know, terrorism, another 9/11 — so we need these back doors’?” His prediction was that Trump would grant it “just like every single president before him gave them what they wanted.” See government encryption back-door demands.[18][19]
Keeping the bases open
Asked in December 2025 who was really directing CIA activity in Ukraine, Kiriakou separated the president’s intent from the agency’s advice. “I think that Donald Trump genuinely wants to see an end to this conflict. I really do. But I think he also has been convinced to keep all these CIA bases open until a peace deal is signed.”[20]
The source of that persuasion, in his reading, is Ratcliffe: “I think Ratcliffe probably has lobbied him, and probably quite hard, not to hamstring CIA operations until the deal is done and we can withdraw CIA personnel.”[20]