The Senate on Thursday confirmed John Ratcliffe as CIA director, President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead America’s premier spy agency and his second nominee to win Senate approval.

Thursday to confirm John Ratcliffe as head of the Central Intelligence Agency, moving quickly to install another member of President Trump's national security team during his first week in office. Why it matters: It's the second time the Senate has confirmed Ratcliffe to a top intelligence job,

A former U.S. Representative from Texas is President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the nation’s intelligence agency. John Ratcliffe, who previously represented the 4th congressional district from 2015 to 2020, was tapped this week to be CIA director for the upcoming administration.

Ratcliffe, Trump’s former director of national intelligence, sought to reassure senators that he would remain apolitical in his role as CIA director.

Ratcliffe, 59, is now the first person to have served as both director of national intelligence and chief of the CIA.

A former federal prosecutor and Texas Republican, Ratcliffe gained prominence as a staunch defender of Trump as a congressman.

WASHINGTON — The Senate voted Thursday to confirm John Ratcliffe as the next CIA director under President Donald Trump, approving the second high-level appointment for the new administration.

A Princeton and Harvard-educated former combat veteran, Hegseth went on to make a career at Fox News, where he hosted a weekend show. Trump tapped him as the defense secretary to lead an organization with nearly 2.1 million service members, about 780,000 civilians and a budget of $850 billion.

The confirmation came just after the first Republican senator came out publicly against the new president's nominee for secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth.

The executive order Trump signed Thursday also aims to declassify the remaining federal records relating to the assassinations of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The order is among a flurry of executive actions Trump has quickly taken the first week of his second term.

Texas State Senator Roland Gutierrez (D), whose district includes the city of Uvalde, introduced four gun safety bills following the 2022 Robb Elementary School mass shooting that left 21 p