First Senate hearing with social distancing

Ratcliffe's confirmation hearing is the first Senate hearing being held since the Senate reconvened this week in a new, socially distant world at the US Capitol. The hearing remains closed to the public,
and the number of Senate aides and reporters has been curtailed. Senators rotated into the hearing in small groups for half-hour blocks in order to limit the number in the room at one time.


A nominee's family members are nearly always in attendance for confirmation hearings, but Ratcliffe's were not present on Tuesday.

 Ratcliffe was supposed to be introduced by former Attorney General in the George W. Bush administration, John Ashcroft.

Instead, Senate Intelligence member Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, read excerpts of Ashcroft's planned statement.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr, a North Carolina Republican who was cool to Ratcliffe's nomination last year, said after Ratcliffe was nominated a second time this year that he would support the pick.

In a sign of the bipartisan concern about Trump's treatment of intelligence officials and the firing of Atkinson, Burr's first question asked Ratcliffe generally about the importance of the intelligence community's inspector general.

"Given your experience as a member of House Intelligence Committee, we expect you to lead the intelligence community with integrity, serve as a forceful advocate for the professionals in the intelligence community and ensure that the intel enterprise operates lawfully ethically and morally," Burr said in his opening statement.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, presented Ratcliffe with his statements made during the House's impeachment hearings last year on the Ukraine whistleblower, who came under attack by the President and his allies in Congress.

Ratcliffe responded that he didn't want to "relitigate" the impeachment inquiry.

"My issue was not with the whistleblower, my issue was with what I saw as a lack of due process in the House process," he said.

Ratcliffe was later pressed by Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, to commit unequivocally to submit credible whistleblower complaints to Congress, a question stemming from the fight over the Ukraine whistleblower report last year.

"You want to have it both ways," Wyden said after Ratcliffe said he would follow the law. "You want to try to portray yourself as a defender of the Constitution and then you water it down with the specifics."

Ratcliffe committed at Tuesday's hearing to holding the annual World Wide Threats hearing, an annual assessment by the intelligence community that has previously been marked by public testimony from top officials but had not yet been scheduled for this year.

CNN reported in January that US intelligence officials quietly asked the Senate and House Intelligence committees not to hold public hearings on this year's assessment after testimony from agency chiefs last year prompted an angry response from Trump, according to a source familiar with the talks.