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WASHINGTON — President Trump first picked Representative John Ratcliffe of Texas to be the nation’s intelligence chief last summer, but resistance in the Republican Senate was so firm that Mr. Ratcliffe’s name was withdrawn before his nomination ever became official.
Eight months later, Mr. Ratcliffe is back. On Tuesday, he will step before many of those same lawmakers on the Senate Intelligence Committee for a confirmation hearing to be the director of national intelligence — this time as a full-fledged nominee whose prospects have vastly improved as Republican opposition has softened.
Democrats are still preparing to challenge his credentials and will resurface instances in which he appears to have exaggerated his law enforcement and national security experience as a federal prosecutor in Texas. And they will argue that Mr. Ratcliffe’s reputation as one of Mr. Trump’s most vocal defenders in the House and on Fox News, where he has offered blistering accusations of rampant anti-Trump bias in some of the agencies he wants to lead, disqualifies him for a position that has historically been apart from politics.
Trump administration officials are confident that Mr. Ratcliffe can smooth over lingering unease with assurances that he will set aside his own political views and refocus intelligence agencies on emerging global threats.
The reversal in fortune has been remarkable, even by the standards of Trump-era Washington. It arguably has as much to do with Richard Grenell, the acting director of national intelligence, as it does with Mr. Ratcliffe, officials involved in the confirmation process said. Key Republican senators including Richard M. Burr of North Carolina, the Intelligence Committee chairman, are uneasy about Mr. Grenell, an aggressive defender of the president who has moved to reshape the office while making liberal use of his Twitter account to spar with the news media and Democrats. (Mr. Grenell also continues to serve as the ambassador to Germany.)
The coronavirus outbreak has also added urgency for many senators to fill the top intelligence job with a more permanent director. American spy agencies seeking to better understand the origins of the outbreak in China have been put in a difficult position as prominent Trump administration officials have insisted that they have seen intelligence pointing to an unsubstantiated theory that the virus accidentally leaked from a lab in China.
Mr. Ratcliffe’s hearing on Tuesday will be the first in-person hearing of any kind the Senate has convened in more than a month because of fears about the coronavirus. Members of the intelligence committee are expected to cycle through the hearing room in small groups, making it more difficult to evaluate their reception of Mr. Ratcliffe.
Mr. Ratcliffe would also need to win the trust of agencies that he has attacked for three years from his perch in the House. Any intelligence chief would play a key role in American defenses against foreign interference in the presidential election in November, while also working around a president who has long viewed the intelligence community’s assessment that Russia interfered on his behalf in 2016 as a threat to the legitimacy of his victory.
In a positive sign for Mr. Ratcliffe’s prospects, Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, a frequent swing vote in contentious confirmation fights, said Friday after a private call with Mr. Ratcliffe that she had found him “knowledgeable,” particularly on cybersecurity, and adequately experienced. Ms. Collins helped craft the 2004 law that created the national intelligence directorate.
“After questioning him in detail, I concluded that he does have the experience to meet the statutory standard to fill the position,” she said in a statement to The New York Times. Ms. Collins also made a glancing acknowledgment of the intense political pressures on intelligence gathering under Mr. Trump.
“I also pressed him for his commitment to deliver objective analysis, regardless of the president’s views on an intelligence issue,” she said.
Mr. Ratcliffe, 54, plans to lean heavily on his four years in the United States attorney’s office for East Texas, according to people familiar with his thinking. He worked from 2004 to 2008 as the office’s antiterrorism coordinator and eventually as the interim U.S. attorney — positions that he said prepared him for the kind of interagency collaboration overseen by the director of national intelligence.
Mr. Ratcliffe has provided committee members with files showing his work on almost three dozen terrorism issues during that stretch, though former colleagues have said they do not remember his office prosecuting any major terrorism cases at the time.
He is also prepared to argue that his critiques of the F.B.I. and the intelligence agencies have been vindicated by the Justice Department’s inspector general and reflect not a deep-seated antagonism but his aspirations for the agencies to improve.
Mr. Ratcliffe will say that depoliticizing the intelligence agencies would be one of his top priorities as director — a promise that could alarm Democrats who see such comments as a euphemism for pulling the agencies closer to Mr. Trump’s views.
The watchdog, Michael E. Horowitz, did conclude that the F.B.I. misused its surveillance authorities in spying on a former Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page. But he also found no evidence of the political motivations that Mr. Ratcliffe and his allies in the House claimed were behind those actions.
Mr. Ratcliffe has repeatedly said he believed Russia interfered to disrupt the 2016 and 2018 elections, but he most likely will try to sidestep contentious fights that have divided even Republicans in the House and Senate over whether intelligence analysts acted properly when they concluded Russia developed a preference in 2016 for Mr. Trump’s candidacy. The Senate panel released a report last month saying Moscow had, but Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee, on which Mr. Ratcliffe serves, concluded the opposite, a view more favorable to Mr. Trump.
Mr. Ratcliffe’s allies and intelligence officials also said he had approached this new nomination with seriousness, studying his briefing books at Liberty Crossing, the suburban Washington headquarters of the director of national intelligence.
Democrats are not likely to be easily persuaded, though, especially after Mr. Ratcliffe’s service as a member of Mr. Trump’s impeachment defense team this year.
Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the panel’s top Democrat, said he would give Mr. Ratcliffe a respectful hearing but made clear he viewed him as part of a broader attempt by Mr. Trump to politicize the nation’s intelligence apparatus.
“The problem is that he is not an intelligence professional, and he is in fact a professional partisan,” said Senator Angus King, the Maine independent who caucuses with Democrats, warning that political motivations warp intelligence assessments and ultimately make the country less safe.
Republicans privately shared similar concerns the first time Mr. Trump announced in July that he would nominate Mr. Ratcliffe to replace Dan Coats as director of national intelligence, only to withdraw the pick within a week. At the time, Republicans preferred career nonpartisan alternatives like Joseph Maguire, a career military official whom Mr. Trump eventually installed for a time, or Susan M. Gordon, Mr. Coats’s deputy.
Mr. Maguire has since been dismissed, a casualty of his association with Mr. Trump’s impeachment. Ms. Gordon is no longer in government service, and the White House has made clear the only alternative to Mr. Ratcliffe is Mr. Grenell, the acting director, who can continue in the role through September, although his term would be extended further if the Senate rejects Mr. Ratcliffe.
Even on an interim basis, Mr. Grenell has declared that he is “not a seat warmer” and set about remaking the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, beginning a review aimed at shrinking the office, replacing the leader of the National Counterterrorism Center and studying whether to reduce intelligence sharing with countries that criminalize homosexuality.
Senators acknowledge that the vote could come down to their preference between the two men.
“The fellow that is the acting is just as partisan, if not more so than Congressman Ratcliffe,” Mr. King said. “If we vote down the congressman, we are still left with a partisan in the position. In effect, we are choosing between Grenell and Ratcliffe.”
Adam Goldman contributed reporting.
