'Conspiracy of silence' critics urge CIA director to 'stand up to Trump' or 'resign'

President Donald Trump's election theft speech put his CIA director in the spotlight — and now calls are mounting for him to push back, according to a new report.

Questions are being raised about Director John Ratcliffe's conduct during the initial investigation into foreign election tampering and his silence now as the president fires off "Looney Tunes" accusations, MS NOW's David Rohde reported Thursday.

Ratcliffe's complicity—or silence—has become impossible to ignore, according to Rohde.

As Trump's current CIA director, Ratcliffe served as Director of National Intelligence from May 2020 through January 2021, controlling what intelligence reached the president's desk and what remained hidden.

The timing, Rohde argued, is damning.

Trump claimed in his recent speech that U.S. intelligence agencies discovered Chinese interference in the 2020 election but deliberately concealed it from him.

Yet Ratcliffe was the gatekeeper deciding what Trump saw and didn't see during that exact period, Rohde noted.

Trump's declassified documents, released to support his election fraud narrative, claim U.S. intelligence learned in 2020 that China had "bought, stolen or hacked" tens of millions of Americans' voting records.

According to Trump, spy agencies kept this bombshell secret.

But Ratcliffe was one of the officials who decided what warranted inclusion in Trump's daily briefings, Rohde wrote. He argued if the intelligence existed as Trump claims, then Ratcliffe bore responsibility for either including or excluding it.

"Critics say that Ratcliffe should stand up to Trump and threaten to resign — or actually resign — as cabinet members did in his first term, including former Defense Secretary Gen. Jim Mattis, former Attorney General Bill Barr, and former CIA director Gina Haspel," Rohde wrote.

Instead, Ratcliffe has maintained silence—enabling what former CIA analyst Julia Curlee describes as a "conspiracy of silence" enveloping Washington.

Curlee, who recently resigned after 20 years of service, told MS NOW, "To me, it was crossing a Rubicon where the institution itself was being conscripted into the creation of a product to reinforce the president's messaging. I never thought that I would see the CIA participating in a presidential effort to delegitimize elections in the eyes of Americans."

Former senior CIA official Marc Polymeropoulos acknowledged Ratcliffe's impossible position: protecting both his job and the CIA's institutional integrity while serving a president hostile to both.

"Ratcliffe certainly does need to play it both ways in some respects, as he's got a workforce at CIA that will not react well to sources and methods being compromised based on cherry-picked intelligence to promote Looney Tunes conspiracy theories," Polymeropoulos, an MS NOW contributor added.

"But at the same time, he's gotta protect his job from the mercurial Trump. So far, he's managed to successfully dance through the raindrops on this issue."