WASHINGTON (AP) — President-elect Donald Trump announced Tuesday that he would nominate John Ratcliffe to serve as CIA director in his new government.

Here are four things you need to know tapped the Republican leading the US government’s main spy agency:

Stint No. 2 in the Trump administration

Ratcliffe spent the final months of Trump’s first term as director of national intelligence, leading U.S. spy agencies during the coronavirus pandemic and as the U.S. government grappled with foreign efforts to interfere in the 2020 presidential election.

His previous experience in intelligence makes him a more traditional choice for the job, which requires Senate confirmation, than some rumored loyalists are being pushed by some Trump supporters.

As DNI, Ratcliffe took part in an unusual late-night press conference just weeks before the 2020 presidential election, in which he and other officials accused Iran of being responsible for a barrage of emails intended to intimidate US voters

He was also criticized for releasing Russian intelligence alleging that damaging information about Democrats was collected during the 2016 election while acknowledging that it has not been verified. Democrats blasted the move as a partisan stunt that politicized the intelligence community.

Ratcliffe made headlines again weeks later when he dismissed claims from dozens of former intelligence officials that the disclosure of emails from a laptop that Hunter Biden delivered to a computer repair shop in Delaware showed the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign.

“The intelligence community doesn’t believe that because there is no intelligence to support that,” he said.

A fierce loyalist in Congress

Ratcliffe was elected to Congress in 2014, but his visibility increased in 2019 a staunch defender of Trump during the House of Representatives’ first impeachment against him.

He served on Trump’s impeachment advisory team and extensively interviewed witnesses during the impeachment hearings.

“This is the thinnest, fastest, weakest impeachment our country has ever seen,” Ratcliffe said after the Democratic-controlled House voted to impeach Trump over a phone call he had with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

When former special counsel Robert Mueller appeared before the House Judiciary Committee to testify about his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, Ratcliffe was among the more fervent Republican questioners. the prosecutor vigorously questioned and destroying the report he produced.

Previous questions about his resume

Although Ratcliffe eventually got the job at DNI, things did not go smoothly.

In reality, he withdrew from treatment in August 2019 After just five days he started receiving more and more questions about his experience and qualifications.

Trump has put forward Ratcliffe’s name to replace the departed Dan Coats. But Democrats openly dismissed the Republican as an unconditional partisan, and Republicans offered only lukewarm and cautious expressions of support. Multiple news stories questioned Ratcliffe’s qualifications and suggested that he had misrepresented his experience as a federal prosecutor in Texas, a job he held before joining Congress.

Ratcliffe said in a statement at the time that he remained confident he could have done the job “with the objectivity, fairness and integrity that our intelligence services need and deserve.”

“But,” he added, “I do not want any national security and intelligence debate surrounding my nomination, no matter how untrue, to become a purely political and partisan issue.”

He was reappointed for the job the following February confirmed in May 2020 by a sharply divided Senate.

A Chinese hawk

Ratcliffe has repeatedly sounded the alarm about China, calling the country the greatest threat to American interests and the rest of the free world.

That view puts him in good company with other new officials in the Trump administration. including Michael Waltz, Trump’s choice for national security adviserwho called for a US boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing due to China’s involvement in the origins of COVID-19 and its continued mistreatment of the Uyghur minority Muslim population.

“The information is clear: Beijing plans to dominate the US and the rest of the planet economically, militarily and technologically,” Ratcliffe wrote in a December 2020 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. “Many of China’s major public initiatives and leading companies provide only a layer of camouflage for the activities of the Chinese Communist Party.”

China is bracing for new tensions with the Trump administration — and possibly a tariff war — while national security and intelligence officials who track China remain concerned about economic espionage, cyberattacks, technological advances and disputes over Taiwan that could further disrupt relations.