Long before Donald Trump rewarded Tulsi Gabbard’s loyalty with a nomination to be the next director of national intelligence, before her friendliness with Tucker Carlson, and before her association with the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, she was loyal to another charismatic leader. A man who remains mostly unknown outside Hawaii but is reputed to have a powerful hold over his followers.

That leader is Chris Butler, the founder of an offshoot of the Hare Krishna movement in Hinduism, called the Science of Identity Foundation. Butler’s followers know him as Jagad Guru Siddhaswarupananda Paramahamsa, and Gabbard, who identifies as Hindu, has called him her “guru-dev,” or spiritual master. According to its website, the foundation promotes yoga meditation to achieve spiritual and physical enlightenment, but Butler, well known for his fervent and graphic sermons about the evils of gay sex, does not appear to tolerate dissent from his followers. Some former devotees have called the secretive group a cult.

Other than raw ambition, Gabbard’s adherence to Butler’s foundation has been the only perceptible through line in her switchbacking, two-decade political career. First there was an astonishingly quick leap from enigmatic state lawmaker to national Democratic Party leader; then came Gabbard’s almost-as-quick falling-out with the party establishment; there followed an inscrutable congressional record, including a seemingly inexplicable visit with a Middle East dictator; after that was Gabbard’s stint as a Fox News media darling, and finally her rebirth as a MAGA Republican, nominated to be America’s next spymaster.

While Gabbard awaits a confirmation hearing, even senators in Trump’s party seem concerned about her suitability. Maybe they should be: Democrats figured out the hard way that they couldn’t rely on Gabbard; Republicans may soon learn the same.

To understand how Gabbard ended up in the middle of such a strange ideological Venn diagram, it helps to know about her early years. Born in American Samoa, Gabbard grew up in Hawaii, where she was homeschooled and spent time surfing in the blue waves off Oahu. Her father, Mike, is now a Democratic state senator, but he’s done a bit of his own party-flipping; during Gabbard’s childhood, Mike was an independent, and later switched to the Republican Party, after leading Hawaii’s movement against same-sex marriage. He launched a group called Stop Promoting Homosexuality Hawaii and hosted a radio show titled Let’s Talk Straight Hawaii. In 1998, Mike Gabbard put out a TV ad featuring a teenage Tulsi and her siblings that likened marrying someone of the same sex to marrying your dog.

The Gabbard family was—and, according to several Hawaii residents and people familiar with the group, still is—devoted to Butler and his foundation. “The belief system was [Butler’s] interpretation of the Hare Krishna belief system, plus Buddhism, Christianity, and whatever else,” Lalita Mann, a former disciple of Butler’s, told me. Fraternizing with outsiders was frowned upon, Mann said; complete obedience was expected: “To offend him would be offending God.” Gabbard’s own aunt once described the group as “the alt-right of the Hare Krishna movement.”

Butler had an appetite for temporal as well as spiritual power. Gabbard, a smart, good-looking girl from a political family, always appealed to him, Mann and Anita Van Duyn, another defector from the group, told me. Butler described Gabbard as a stellar pupil of his teaching. In her teens, Gabbard reportedly attended a school run by Butler’s followers in the Philippines. “He always wanted someone to be high up in the federal government” to direct the culture toward godliness, Van Duyn told me. Trump’s team rejected this characterization. “This is a targeted hit on her faith, fomenting Hinduphobia,” Alexa Henning, a spokesperson for the Trump transition, told me. “The repeated attacks that she has sustained from the media and Democrats about her faith and her loyalty to our country are not only false smears; they are bigoted as well.” (Gabbard herself did not respond to requests for comment for this story.)

The Science of Identity Foundation leader was not the only person to see Gabbard’s appeal. The people I interviewed described the surfer cum mixed-martial-arts aficionado as shy but warm. She has a rich, low voice, and always greets people with a friendly “Aloha.” Her demeanor helps explain how quickly she rocketed to political success from a young age. She chooses her words carefully, and listens intently, often seeming like the most mature person in a room, even when she is one of the youngest. “She cocks her head, and she pulls you in” to the “Tulsi hug,” one Hawaii Democrat told me. “It’s very mesmerizing.” Gabbard, in other words, has charisma. And she has always made it count.

In 2002, soon after she married her first husband, Gabbard dropped out of community college and ran for a seat in the Hawaii state House. In that race, and in others that followed, a swarm of volunteers associated with Butler’s group would descend on the district to knock on doors and pass out yard signs, according to someone who worked with Gabbard’s campaign in those early days, and who asked for anonymity to speak candidly. Back then, Gabbard shared her father’s views on same-sex marriage and opposed abortion rights, two positions that were—particularly in recent years—politically risky in solid-blue Hawaii. But she was clearly struggling to form her ideology, the former campaign colleague said, and determine a political identity of her own.

After one term in office, Gabbard joined the Hawaii Army National Guard, and went to Iraq as part of a medical unit, the first of two Middle East deployments. After her return, she and her husband divorced. In 2010, she ran successfully for a seat on the Honolulu city council. “She was as ambitious as you could possibly be,” Gabbard’s campaign colleague told me. And she was respected. Gabbard was racking up experiences, fleshing out her political résumé. Congress was next for Gabbard, and everybody knew it.

In the fall of 2011, something happened that shocked politicians in Hawaii. EMILY’s List, the national organization whose goal is to elect pro-abortion-rights women to Congress, announced that it was backing Gabbard. To political observers, it didn’t make sense. Gabbard had a D behind her name, but was she really a Democrat? Behind the scenes, EMILY’s List was wondering the same thing. Although her position on abortion had evolved in ways acceptable to the organization, Gabbard was still iffy on same-sex marriage. Her answers on the EMILY’s List application had made its leaders uneasy, one former staffer told me, and that staffer was asked to call Gabbard for clarification. During their conversation, Gabbard said she didn’t want the government involved in marriage. The staffer pointed out that the government was already involved in heterosexual marriage, so it wouldn’t be fair to deny the same access to gay couples. Gabbard seemed not to have considered this, the staffer told me, and after only a few minutes on the phone, Gabbard declared that her position had changed. Politicians typically do some finagling to secure the support of special-interest groups, but this was different.

“I’ve never had another conversation like that,” said the staffer, who still works in Democratic politics but asked to remain anonymous in order to speak candidly. “She was willing to do or say whatever. It was like she had absolutely no moral compass.” I heard the same sentiment from numerous people who have worked with Gabbard, both in Hawaii and at the federal level.

Gabbard’s leftward journey was well under way. Her second Middle East deployment, to Kuwait, had inspired a “gradual metamorphosis” on social issues, she told Honolulu Civil Beat in 2012, adding, “I’m not my dad. I’m me.” By the time she got to Congress, in 2013, Democrats had embraced her like a long-lost friend. Gabbard was celebrated as the first Hindu member of Congress and was eagerly welcomed in the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus. Nancy Pelosi called her an “emerging star,” and House leaders gave her a seat on the prominent Armed Forces Committee. She was, to use a more contemporary comparison, AOC before Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

“There was this initial huge fascination with Gabbard” inside the party, a former Democratic House staffer, who requested anonymity to speak about his time working closely with Gabbard, told me. President Barack Obama himself lobbied for Gabbard to get a vice chairmanship on the Democratic National Committee, its former chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz told me. The Florida lawmaker hesitated at first. “I was warned early on that she was close to extremists in Hawaii,” Wasserman Schultz told me, referring to anti-gay activists. Still, she gave Gabbard the benefit of the doubt.

Gabbard proved popular among the other freshmen. “She was funny, she was engaging,” a former House colleague and friend of Gabbard’s, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, told me. She ran around with a small, bipartisan group of lawmakers, including Representatives Beto O’Rourke of Texas, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, and Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma; some of them met for CrossFit in the mornings.

But the congressional crush on Gabbard fizzled almost as quickly as it began. Wasserman Schultz told me that the DNC had a hard time getting Gabbard to show up for meetings or conference calls. When a House vote against employment discrimination came up, Gabbard was difficult to pin down, Wasserman Schultz said—even though, as a DNC vice chair, she should have been “the easiest ‘yes’ in the caucus.”

[Read: The thing that binds Gabbard, Gaetz, and Hegseth to Trump]

Gabbard seemed eager to stand out in a different way. She took to sitting on the Republican side of the House chamber. Despite her DNC perch, she voted with Republicans to condemn the Obama administration for not alerting Congress about a prisoner exchange with the Taliban in 2014, and the next year criticized the Democratic president’s reluctance to refer to Islamic State terrorists as “Islamic extremists.”

The representative from Hawaii was not facing a tough reelection, so none of these positions made sense to her fellow Democrats. Some suggested that she was a rare independent thinker in Congress; others identified in her a less virtuous strain of opportunism. Gabbard had “masked herself as a progressive to gain power,” Wasserman Schultz told me. After all, voters in Hawaii almost never elect Republicans to Congress.

Others pointed to deeper forces. “I think something happened around 2013,” Gabbard’s campaign colleague from Hawaii told me, pointing out that, at the time, several of her original congressional staffers resigned, and Gabbard replaced them with people affiliated with the Science of Identity Foundation. In 2015, Gabbard married Abraham Williams, the son of her office manager, both of whom, the colleague told me, were involved in the group. The couple’s Oahu wedding was attended by several members of Congress, including then–House Whip Steny Hoyer, as well as a representative from Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu-nationalist party. It seemed as though Butler’s group had reeled her back in, the campaign colleague said. He remembers thinking, “I don’t know who the hell you are anymore.”

During the 2016 Democratic primary, Gabbard resigned from the DNC and endorsed Senator Bernie Sanders’s campaign for president because, she said, Hillary Clinton was too hawkish. Sanders-aligned progressives appreciated her support, especially because the Vermont senator had just been shellacked in South Carolina. On the trail, Gabbard spoke confidently about anti-interventionism, climate change, and Medicare for All. “I couldn’t think of an issue then where we had any degree of separation,” Larry Cohen, a union leader and the chair of the pro-Sanders progressive group Our Revolution, told me.

Senator Bernie Sanders with Gabbard at his campaign rally in Gettysburg ahead of the Democratic primary election in Pennsylvania, April 2016 (Mark Wilson / Getty)

But, in 2017, Gabbard made a move that stumped her new progressive friends, as well as most everyone else: She flew to Syria, in the middle of its civil war, and twice met with the now-deposed dictator Bashar al-Assad, who had by then already killed hundreds of his own people using chemical weapons, and who clung to power thanks to aid from Vladimir Putin. The original plan, according to a former staffer for Gabbard, had been to meet with everyday Syrians and “bear witness.” But as The Washington Post reported today, the trip’s actual itinerary deviated dramatically from the one that had been approved by the House Ethics Committee. The meetings with Assad had not been in the plan, and even Gabbard’s staffer, like others on her team, did not know about them until after they’d happened. “You fucked us,” the staffer, who also asked for anonymity to speak about confidential matters, remembers telling Gabbard later. “The reason you told us you were going on this trip will never come up again. It will only ever be about you meeting with Assad.”

For D.C. institutionalists, Gabbard’s conversations with Assad broke a long-standing convention that members of Congress do not conduct freelance foreign policy. But many also saw the trip as an unforgivable swerve toward autocracy.

Outside the Washington scene, Gabbard’s independence and charisma still counted. When Gabbard ran in the Democratic presidential primary in 2019, she could still muster an enthusiastic if motley alliance of progressives, libertarians, and conservative Hindus. She also did well among the kind of people who are fond of saying that all politicians are corrupt and neither political party is good for America. “I’m voting for her. I decided. I like her. I met her in person. Fuck it,” Joe Rogan said on his podcast that year.

Despite that glowing endorsement, Gabbard never scored above single digits in the contest, and dropped out of the race in March 2020. In the years that followed, she would pop up now and again with new and surprising takes. In December 2020, Gabbard introduced a bill to ban trans women and girls from playing women’s sports, plus two pieces of anti-abortion legislation. In 2021, she left Congress altogether. The next year, when Russia invaded Ukraine, she blamed President Joe Biden and NATO for ignoring “Russia’s legitimate security concerns.” Then she turned up as a featured speaker at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference.

At a late-summer conference in Michigan last year, Gabbard announced that she was supporting Donald Trump for president. She completed her political migration in October at a MAGA rally in North Carolina, when she said that she was joining the Republican Party. She praised Trump for transforming the GOP into “the party of the people and the party of peace.” Her message was that she hadn’t left the Democrats; they had left her. “People evolve on politics all the time,” the former House colleague and friend told me. “But that’s a long way from saying Hey, the party went too far to embracing Donald Trump.”

Gabbard’s instincts are those of a “moth to a flame of power,” Wasserman Schultz told me. And Trump’s flame is burning brightly again. But in Gabbard’s dogged pursuit of power, or at least of proximity to power, others see the influence not of a new guru, but of the old one: Butler. “She’s his loyal servant,” Van Duyn, the Science of Identity Foundation defector, said, and Gabbard regards him as “possessing infallible authority.” Van Duyn also told me that she has sent letters to several Democratic lawmakers, asking them to vote against Gabbard’s confirmation as DNI because she fears that sensitive intelligence “can and will be communicated to her guru.”

Each of the current and former Democratic lawmakers I spoke with for this story had concerns about the Gabbard-Butler relationship. “There are some very tough questions that need to be asked,” Representative Jill Tokuda, Democrat of Hawaii, told me. “Who’s really calling the shots when it comes to what Tulsi Gabbard believes?”

Gabbard at the Trump campaign rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City, on October 27, 2024 (Michael M. Santiago / Getty)

Butler, who is now in his late 70s and reportedly living in a beachfront home in Kailua, did not respond to a request for comment. But in a statement, Jeannie Bishop, the foundation’s president, disputed the accounts of people whom the group considers to be “propagating misconceptions,” and accused the media of “fomenting” Hinduphobia. (Butler’s foundation, along with a collection of 50 Hindu groups, sent out a press release last week blasting recent media coverage as “Hinduphobic.”)

[Tom Nichols: Tulsi Gabbard’s nomination is a national-security risk]

Regardless of whom her opportunism ultimately serves, political opportunity has come again for Gabbard. After she hitched her wagon to Trump, he chose her to be his spymaster in chief—a position for which she does not seem remotely qualified. The current director, Avril Haines, was confirmed after previously serving as deputy national security adviser, deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and deputy counsel to the president for national-security affairs in the Office of White House Counsel. Gabbard has no similar background in intelligence or agency leadership. Henning, the Trump spokesperson, pointed to Gabbard’s endorsement from former CIA Director of Counterterrorism Bernard Hudson, who has commended Gabbard’s “independent thinking.”

Gabbard’s Assad visit and her pro-Russian views also remain fresh in the minds of many in Congress. Nothing proves that Gabbard is a “Russian asset,” as Hillary Clinton once famously put it, but Moscow seems gleeful about her selection to lead the intelligence agency: “The C.I.A. and the F.B.I. are trembling,” the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda crowed after her nomination was announced. Another Russian state outlet called Gabbard a “comrade.”

Judging by the congressional hearings so far, traditional expertise and credentials may not matter much to the GOP lawmakers charged with confirming Trump’s picks. But the incoherence of Gabbard’s ideological evolution may yet count against her: Reliability could be the sticking point. Republicans should know, as well as Democrats, that “she’s ruthless in her pursuit of personal power,” the Hawaii campaign colleague told me. “Even if that means disappointing MAGA folks or Trump, it’s clear she’d do it in a heartbeat.”

During her eight years in Congress, Gabbard was a fierce defender of privacy rights, something her supporters on both the right and the left long admired. In particular, she had opposed the reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, legislation that permits some warrantless surveillance of American citizens. But after meeting with senators last week, Gabbard announced that the act’s surveillance capability “must be safeguarded.” The would-be director of national intelligence had had a change of heart.

In September 2016, the CIA sent a classified memo to the FBI, which was investigating Russian interference in the presidential election. According to Russian intelligence sources, Hillary Clinton had approved a plan to publicly tie Donald Trump to the country’s hack of the Democratic National Committee. The Russians reportedly said that Clinton wanted to distract the public from the scandal over her use of a private email server while she was secretary of state.

As secret tips from spies go, this one was not earth-shattering. FBI agents didn’t need the CIA to tell them that Clinton was painting Trump as an ally of the Kremlin—her campaign chair was on CNN saying just that. Trump was also making Clinton’s case for her: In late July, he had publicly encouraged the Russians to hack her email, which they then tried to do.

The CIA memo may have been obvious and not particularly useful. But it did contain “sensitive information that could be source revealing,” its authors cautioned, so the information was limited to those with a “need-to-know” status and “should not be released in any form.” Exposing human sources—spies—compromises intelligence gathering and can sometimes get them killed. For four years, the document’s stewards complied and kept it secret. Then it caught the attention of John Ratcliffe, President Trump’s director of national intelligence.

[Read: Clinton: Just trust me on this one]

Ratcliffe had been a divisive pick for the nation’s top intelligence adviser, made late in Trump’s term. His critics said he lacked sufficient national-security experience and was a partisan warrior. As a freshman Republican congressman from Texas, he had risen to national prominence by suggesting a theory, during committee hearings and television appearances, that Clinton had engineered the FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s possible connections to Russian interference. (Ratcliffe surely knew that she had not, because this had been exhaustively established by multiple investigations, including one led by Senate Republicans.)

In late September 2020, weeks before voters would choose between Trump and Joe Biden, Ratcliffe declassified and released the CIA memo, along with some notes from an intelligence briefing given to President Barack Obama. He claimed that he was responding to requests from Congress to shed light on the FBI’s Russia investigation, but the documents didn’t provide much new information.

Intelligence officials were appalled. History had repeatedly, painfully, shown that politics and intelligence were a dangerous mix, and as the DNI, Ratcliffe was expected to avoid partisan behavior and safeguard sources and methods. Also, officials warned, the Russians might have wanted that memo to be released; even four years on, anything mentioning Clinton, Russia, and Trump was politically combustible and potentially disruptive to the election. Gina Haspel, then the director of the CIA (a Trump appointment), opposed the document’s release. So did officials at the National Security Agency.

But to Trump and some of his advisers, the memo had a certain expedience. The president seized on it as new evidence of Clinton’s hidden hand in the “Russia hoax,” a subject that reliably caused him to rage against his supposed enemies inside the intelligence agencies.

[Read: Trump vs. the spies]

“It is imperative that the American people now learn what then–Vice President Joe Biden knew about this conspiracy and when he knew it,” the Trump campaign’s communications director said in a statement at the time. “Biden must give a full accounting of his knowledge and his conversations about Clinton’s scheme, which was known to the highest reaches of his administration.”

Trump himself made passing reference to the intelligence in his first debate with Biden, accusing Clinton of “a whole big con job” and the intelligence community of “spying on my campaign.”

Ratcliffe had cherry-picked just the thing to feed Trump’s fixation on “deep state” chicanery and malfeasance. The act was nakedly political. And it surprised no one.

Ratcliffe’s appeal to Trump has always been clear: He’s a political operator willing to push the boundaries of a historically apolitical position in a manner that serves the president’s interests. In November, Trump nominated Ratcliffe for an even more important job than the previous one: CIA director. The question likely to hang over his tenure is how much further he will go to enable Trump’s attacks on the intelligence community.

When Trump nominated Ratcliffe as the DNI in 2019, he gave him marching orders to “rein in” the forces that the president believed were undermining him. “As I think you’ve all learned, the intelligence agencies have run amok,” Trump told reporters. Ratcliffe would get them back in line. But lawmakers were wary of appointing such a staunch partisan, and amid concerns about his experience, Democrats and key Republicans questioned whether he had exaggerated his credentials, something Ratcliffe denied. After only five days, Ratcliffe (who declined to be interviewed for this article) withdrew his candidacy. Trump nominated him again in 2020, and he was narrowly confirmed along party lines, 49–44. He received more votes in opposition than any DNI in the office’s 15-year history.

[Read: Ratcliffe’s withdrawal reveals Trump still doesn’t understand appointments]

When Trump named Ratcliffe as his pick for CIA director, he again made his expectations clear: He praised Ratcliffe for exposing alleged abuses by the FBI and former intelligence officials, and for showing “fake Russian collusion to be a Clinton campaign operation.” But this time, the response in Washington has been muted.

Having served as the DNI for eight months, Ratcliffe is now better qualified to run an intelligence agency. He also benefits from comparison with Trump’s other choices for top national-security positions: at the Pentagon, Pete Hegseth, who has been accused of sexual assault and alcohol abuse (he has denied the allegations); at the FBI, Kash Patel, a fervent Trump supporter who has threatened to investigate the president’s critics, including journalists; and for the DNI, Tulsi Gabbard, a former congresswoman who has expressed sympathy for some of the world’s most notorious anti-American dictators, including Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad.

Compared with these selections, Ratcliffe looks like an elder statesman, and he has essentially been anointed: The Senate will almost certainly confirm him, which will make Ratcliffe the only person ever to have served as both the DNI and the director of the CIA. Several U.S. and allied intelligence officials told me that they would welcome this development, given the alternatives. Patel had been on Trump’s shortlist to run the CIA, some reminded me.

[Read: Trump’s ‘deep state’ revenge]

But the question of where Ratcliffe’s limits lie is even more salient in Trump’s second term. Though the DNI technically ranks higher than the director of the CIA, the latter is the more powerful post. The DNI is largely a managerial job; the CIA director is operational. From Langley, Ratcliffe would control covert intelligence activity. He could learn the locations and identities of spies. The CIA is also the primary interlocutor for foreign intelligence services, which share information that could implicate their sources if exposed. Several foreign intelligence officials have recently told me that they are taking steps to limit how much sensitive intelligence they share with the Trump administration, for fear that it might be leaked or used for political ends.

Some U.S. officials fear that Trump could direct the CIA to undertake illegal activities, such as aiding paramilitary forces inside the United States to secure the border, or clandestinely spying on Americans, knowing that the president would enjoy criminal immunity for official acts thanks to a recent Supreme Court opinion. These are extreme examples, and Trump would surely face internal resistance. But Ratcliffe has demonstrated that he’s willing to break norms and traditions. How would he respond if the president asked—or ordered—him to do something more drastic than declassify documents?

Though Trump has turned to Ratcliffe twice to “rein in” the deep state, his political origin story is actually rooted in the security state’s expansion. After graduating from Notre Dame in 1986, when he was only 20, Ratcliffe went to law school and then into private practice in Texas. “But something was missing,” he told senators at his DNI confirmation hearing. On September 11, 2001, Ratcliffe said, he was at work in a high-rise office building in Dallas that “looked a whole lot like the ones in New York that were under attack”—and he wondered, in the months that followed, how he might devote his time to more meaningful work.

Ratcliffe had gotten to know Matt Orwig, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Texas and a George W. Bush appointee. Orwig needed someone to run a joint terrorism task force, one of the dozens set up after the attacks to coordinate federal and regional security efforts. The goal was not only to prosecute terrorism crimes but to prevent them from happening. Ratcliffe took the job in 2004.

“The whole law-enforcement structure was being remade,” Orwig told me. “There was a lot of information flooding in from different authorities. It was a really big job.” In 2007, Orwig stepped down, and Ratcliffe became U.S. attorney for 11 months. Afterward, he returned to private practice, running the Dallas office of a firm he co-founded with John Ashcroft, Bush’s first attorney general.

Ashcroft became Ratcliffe’s political mentor, an association that seems ironic in retrospect. Ashcroft was in many ways an architect of the powerful national-security bureaucracy that Trump and Ratcliffe now rail against. After 9/11, the attorney general oversaw and approved controversial applications of the PATRIOT Act and other new authorities, including secret wiretapping of phone calls involving Americans. Such counterterrorism measures enhanced the powers of the Justice Department and the intelligence community, and occasionally encroached on civil liberties that Americans had long taken for granted.

Ratcliffe and Ashcroft shared a deeply conservative political outlook, and Ashcroft admired the younger attorney’s commitment to community service. Ratcliffe was also serving as the mayor of Heath, Texas, a bedroom community where he lived with his wife and two children. Ashcroft thought Ratcliffe was suited for national leadership. “We decided he should run for Congress,” Ashcroft told me, and in 2014, Ratcliffe did.

Ratcliffe at his congressional-campaign headquarters in Heath, Texas, March 19, 2014 (Kim Leeson / The Washington Post / Getty)

[Read: The case of John Ashcroft]

Getting to Washington would test Ratcliffe’s budding political skills. Ralph Hall, a conservative Democrat who switched to the GOP in 2004, had reliably represented the fourth congressional district, where Ratcliffe lived, since 1981. At 91, Hall was the oldest-ever member of the House of Representatives, and his voters seemed in no mood to replace him with a young upstart. But the Tea Party was elevating a new generation of conservatives who were suspicious of entrenched power, and in a bid for change that avoided taking aim at Hall’s age, Ratcliffe promised to bring “energetic leadership” to the district. “It’ll be up to the voters to decide whether or not a candidate is too old,” Ratcliffe, who was 42 years younger than Hall, told reporters at the time.

Ratcliffe picked up endorsements from conservative groups, including the Club for Growth, and eventually defeated Hall in a runoff. He was the first primary challenger to beat a Republican incumbent in Texas in 20 years. His political acumen was now beyond dispute, according to Todd Gillman, a reporter for The Dallas Morning News. “Affable. Discreet. Knife fighter,” Gillman wrote in a recent column for The Washington Post. “All of it was there to see when Ratcliffe took down the oldest member of Congress ever without coming off like a jerk.”

In Washington, Ratcliffe discovered the full extent of his talents, which included a lawyerly facility for constructing political narratives that appealed to Republicans. He fell in with fellow conservatives who were also new to Congress. Trey Gowdy, another former federal prosecutor, introduced him to his fellow South Carolinian Tim Scott. The three spent many evenings together, eating dinner and talking about their lives and political ideas.

Gowdy helped Ratcliffe raise his national profile and get Trump’s attention. At a hearing in September 2016, the congressman grilled James Comey, the FBI director, about the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private email server, questioning whether officials had already decided that there was no prosecutable crime when they sat down to interview the presidential candidate. Ratcliffe was aggressive but not hectoring. His questions were clearly prepared, but his delivery seemed unrehearsed. He corrected Comey’s account of a chain of events in the FBI’s investigation, prompting the director to admit that he might have been misremembering. It wasn’t exactly a gotcha moment, but Ratcliffe showed that he could confuse an adversary with a blizzard of facts.

After Ratcliffe finished with Comey, Gowdy passed him a handwritten note: “100 percent A+.”

“That was really a moment for me where I thought, You know, I’m really where I’m supposed to be,” Ratcliffe recalled in 2021 on a podcast that Gowdy hosts.

Ratcliffe credited Gowdy with steering his career. “You said to me, ‘Johnny, focus on what you do well, get better at it, and shut up about the rest.’ And I literally followed that advice. In other words, only go on TV to talk about things that you know about. Don’t try and be a master of all trades. Do the things that you do really well and people will notice, and it will serve you well. And it did.”

Gowdy helped make Ratcliffe a go-to interrogator when congressional committees wanted to quiz the FBI or poke holes in the Russia investigation. Ratcliffe stuck to a theme of pernicious bias against Trump. He suggested that political animus, not genuine concern about foreign-intelligence threats, was the impetus behind the Russia probe. He also suggested that the CIA—the agency he is about to lead—may have kicked off the investigation. (It did not, and this is among the fringiest views that Ratcliffe has flirted with.)

[Read: Don’t let the Russia probe become the new Benghazi]

Ratcliffe’s performances impressed Trump. But although he, Gowdy, and Scott are deeply conservative, they are not MAGA Republicans. They seem to share Trump’s antipathy toward the federal bureaucracy. But their political ideas were shaped by forces that gave rise to Trump, not by the man himself. Gowdy, who left Congress in 2019, got on Trump’s bad side for not embracing his conspiracy theories about Democrats spying on his campaign, and Scott competed against Trump in the GOP’s 2024 presidential primary.

As for Ratcliffe, he has more fiercely defended Trump as a victim of an unfair system than championed him as a hero sent to fix it. In one of the most-watched hearings of the Trump era, Ratcliffe lit into Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the language of his final report, which stated that although the investigation “does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.” That was an unfair standard no American should face, Ratcliffe insisted. “Donald Trump is not above the law,” he thundered. “But he damn sure shouldn’t be below the law.”

It was a principled position, and perhaps a reflection of sincere disquiet about the politicization of law enforcement and the intelligence community. Ashcroft told me that he shares such concerns and speaks with Ratcliffe four or five times a year about reforming the system. But when Ratcliffe takes these stances, he also gives credence to Trump’s refrains about “Crooked Hillary” and the deep state. And he makes little effort to distinguish Trump’s critique from his own.

Jim Jordan speaks to Ratcliffe during a House Judiciary Committee hearing, December 9, 2019. (Zach Gibson / Getty)

[Read: Republicans take their shot at Mueller—and narrowly miss]

Ratcliffe probably wouldn’t have become the director of national intelligence if not for another pro-Trump partisan, Richard Grenell. The then-ambassador to Germany was also serving as the acting intelligence director when Trump nominated Ratcliffe for the second time, in 2020. The president essentially forced the Senate to choose between the two. Grenell had long been loathed and even feared in some quarters of Congress for his heated rhetoric and vicious social-media attacks. Suddenly, Ratcliffe seemed like the less political option.

Ratcliffe took office less than six months before the 2020 election. The intelligence agencies he now led were on guard against foreign governments trying to skew political contests with misleading social-media posts and divisive propaganda. Russia, once again, was a top concern.

Nothing angered Trump like talk of Russia trying to help him win an election. His aides had learned to avoid the subject. The president had identified China as the biggest strategic threat to the United States, an assessment that many Democrats and Republicans shared, Ratcliffe among them. But career intelligence analysts doubted that China intended to disrupt the election. What Beijing really wanted was stability in its relationship with Washington, they argued. Trying to help one candidate win, as Russia had in 2016, could backfire.

[Read: Trump’s intelligence war is also an election story]

In August 2020, the intelligence community produced a classified assessment of election threats. Then Ratcliffe intervened, analysts have said, and inserted a warning about China that was an “outrageous misrepresentation of their analysis,” according to a later report by an intelligence ombudsman.

The DNI typically does not help write intelligence assessments, because he is a political appointee, and so his involvement could present a conflict of interest. But Ratcliffe argued that although his intervention was unusual, it was not unprecedented, nor was it inappropriate. He maintained that the analysts were thinking too narrowly: China’s well-documented efforts to lobby state and local officials, and to steal corporate intellectual property and classified government information, were aimed at achieving political outcomes. That made them, in effect, a kind of election interference. The ombudsman also found that the analysts working on China and the ones working on Russia used different definitions for influence and interference. Ratcliffe argued that such discrepancies could create the false impression that Russia was trying to affect the U.S. election but China was not.

“I know my conclusions are right, based on the intelligence that I see,” he said, according to the ombudsman. “Many analysts think I am going off the script. They don’t realize that I did it based on the intelligence.”

Ratcliffe’s defenders say that his role as the DNI obligated him to speak up, even if that meant straying into red-hot political topics. “What I saw was him reflecting a value of transparency and informing the public,” said one U.S. intelligence official who worked for Ratcliffe when he was the DNI and asked not to be identified by name. “Sometimes he would challenge assessments and assumptions, I think in the interest of seeing if they would hold. He is an attorney by trade. You kind of have to keep that in mind when you brief him.”

Ratcliffe wasn’t the only one to gauge the threat from China more broadly: Two senior intelligence officers also expressed views on China’s interference activities that were in line with Ratcliffe’s assessment. But Ratcliffe didn’t raise the same level of concern about Russia, which many analysts thought posed the more direct threat to the election. He framed the issue, not for the first time, in a way that lent support to Trump’s political argument. And because the DNI was making that case, the ostensibly objective work of intelligence now had a partisan gloss.

Ratcliffe leaving a meeting with Senate Minority Whip John Thune after being nominated to be the CIA director, December 4, 2024 (Andrew Harnik / Getty)

[Read: Trump calls out election meddling—by China]

When announcing Ratcliffe’s nomination for CIA director, Trump indicated what he valued most in his pick: From “exposing” the Russia investigation as the alleged handiwork of the Clinton campaign to catching the FBI’s abuse of Civil Liberties at the FISA Court, John Ratcliffe has always been a warrior for Truth and Honesty with the American public,” Trump wrote in a social-media post. The reference to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court was shorthand for one of Trump’s elastic theories about how Democrats had spied on his 2016 campaign.

He also lauded Ratcliffe for publicly refuting 51 former intelligence officers who had claimed in a letter that the 2020 discovery of emails on a laptop purporting to belong to Joe Biden’s son Hunter had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” Ratcliffe was right about that one: No evidence linked Hunter Biden’s laptop to a Russian plot to harm his father. But the letter by the former officials was an act of free speech and an expression of opinion by former officials and experts—not something that the DNI traditionally makes his business.

In the four years he has been out of government, Ratcliffe has remained an enthusiastic critic of the intelligence community. He co-authored a September 2023 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal with a former aide, reflecting on “a dangerous trend inside the CIA to politicize intelligence on China, and to suppress dissenting views that stray from the company line.” He was particularly worried about resistance to investigating the origins of the coronavirus pandemic. The once-fringe view that the virus likely originated in a laboratory in China, which Ratcliffe believes, has gained more respectability thanks in part to U.S. intelligence.

[Read: The coronavirus conspiracy boom]

Tim Scott told me that Ratcliffe’s controversial positions have aged well. “Some of the time he stood alone or in the minority and took a scathing rebuke from the intellectuals in our country,” the senator said. “I think the truth of the matter is, he was right—about the origins of COVID, the Biden laptop, and Russiagate.”

In other scenarios, however—the memo about the Clinton campaign and Russian hacking comes to mind—Ratcliffe conducted himself less like an intelligence adviser, who is supposed to help the president make a decision, and more like a litigator doing his best to help his client win an argument, or a political pugilist eager to score points.

Still, unlike some others in Trump’s orbit—most notably Kash Patel—Ratcliffe has shown that he does have limits. Shortly after the 2020 election, Trump offered Ratcliffe the job that he had long wanted, and that his friend Trey Gowdy had said he was perfect for: attorney general. The president was prepared to fire Bill Barr, who’d rejected Trump’s baseless notions of widespread voter fraud. According to an account in Michael Bender’s book, Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost, Ratcliffe had privately told Trump that no intelligence suggested that foreign governments had hacked voting machines or changed the outcome of the election. If he became attorney general, he’d be expected to advocate for an idea he knew wasn’t true. Ratcliffe declined Trump’s offer.

In this respect, Ratcliffe might seem like one of the so-called adults in the room during the first Trump administration—the officials who slow-rolled orders or even tried to block them as a check against what they considered to be the president’s worst impulses. But people who know Ratcliffe told me that this was not his profile. He is on board with Trump’s policies and doesn’t believe that regulating the president is his job. He won’t cross his boss, either. To this day, nearly eight years after the CIA, FBI, and NSA reached a unanimous, unclassified assessment on Russian election interference in 2016, Ratcliffe has never said publicly whether he agrees with one of its key findings: that the Russians were trying to help Trump win.

[Read: The U.S. needs to face up to its long history of election meddling]

If he disagrees with that position, he surely would have said so, just as he has disputed other intelligence judgments he finds lacking or wrong. But his silence is telling. If he does agree, and says so publicly, he will not be the next director of the CIA.

At his confirmation hearing, senators are likely to ask Ratcliffe whether he plans to further Trump’s interests. Not the president’s policies—all CIA directors do that—but his political preferences, prejudices, and vendettas. Only Ratcliffe knows the answer to this question. But alone among Trump’s picks to head the national-security agencies, he comes with a clear track record in the role.