This is the Cater Daily Podcast for Thursday, August 1st, 2019.

I'm Caleb Brown.

What qualifies someone to be the Director of National Intelligence?

And what are the costs of filling that office with not

someone with decades of experience in Intelligence, but instead of fierce

partisan and a loyalist to the President. Representative John Ratcliffe appears to fit that bill.

Cato's Julian Sanchez discusses the importance and subtle ways a D&I can drive policy.

Who's had this job even just in this administration?

So when you look at the history of this office, Ratcliffe's representative Ratcliffe

certainly sticks out of someone with by far the thinnest resume of the batch at least, you know, relevant to intelligence work.

Currently we've got Dan Coates, a former senator who served for many years on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence,

had before that been Ambassador to Germany, had before that been in Congress for many years.

He was arguably maybe the one with the least relevant experience to that point, but someone

with a long history in both intelligence oversight and diplomacy.

We had James Clapper, certainly not someone I'm a fan of on number levels.

He, I think really diminished his office when he misled Congress about

the existence of a bulk metadata collection program. But if you look at his fitness for the job in terms of experience, he certainly

had it, decades of service to the intelligence community, including directing the National

Geospatial Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence

Agency.

I don't like anyone could question his qualifications again as a matter of experience.

Dennis Blair, a four-star Navy Admiral who had worked in some intelligence roles during his long

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