Trump Appoints Michael Ellis Deputy Director of the CIA

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks at the White House, in Washington, U.S. February 3, 2025.
16:25 JST, February 4, 2025
President Donald Trump on Monday named Michael Ellis deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, putting a lawyer and staunch ally into a powerful role that does not require Senate confirmation.
Ellis will be No. 2 to John Ratcliffe, who was confirmed as CIA director last month.
Ellis was initially slated to be the CIA’s general counsel, according to two people familiar with the deliberations who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel matters. But as deliberations over Ratcliffe’s potential deputy dragged on, it became apparent that Ellis was a consensus pick for the deputy slot, one of these people said.
Ellis, general counsel at the video streaming site Rumble, was a visiting fellow for law and technology at the Heritage Foundation, where he had a hand in producing the intelligence chapter of Project 2025, the policy playbook created by the pro-Trump think tank, according to a person familiar with his work.
On social media, Trump called Ellis a “smart and highly respected lawyer” and said he would help “fix the CIA, and make it, once again, the Greatest Intelligence Agency in the World.”
Ellis worked as an aide to Republican former congressman Devin Nunes, the onetime chair of the House Intelligence Committee, and served in various national security positions during Trump’s first term. He was a legal adviser, and then senior director for intelligence programs, at the National Security Council and briefly general counsel of the National Security Agency.
The CIA deputy traditionally runs the spy agency on a day-to-day basis, as the director is often called on to attend White House meetings, meet foreign counterparts overseas and at its Langley, Virginia, headquarters, and consult with congressional intelligence committees.
In naming Ellis to the powerful spy job, the president praised him for his role, while at the NSC, in providing Nunes with intelligence reports in 2017 showing that Trump campaign officials were unintentionally caught up in foreign monitoring conducted by U.S. spy agencies. The findings became a flash point in the controversy over Russian interference in the 2016 election and fueled Trump’s claims of abuse by the Obama administration.
Ellis also figured in the controversy over Trump’s effort in 2019 to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden and his son Hunter. According to testimony given by Alexander Vindman, a former NSC official, Ellis made the initial suggestion to move a memorandum of Trump’s call with the Ukrainian leader to a highly classified server.
Other high-profile assignments included reviewing for classified information a memoir written by John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, a process that resulted in the Trump administration suing Bolton to try to halt publication. A federal judge allowed publication to proceed while expressing agreement with some of the government’s concerns.
Ellis was named general counsel of the National Security Agency in November 2020, a move that was opposed by the agency’s then-director, Paul Nakasone. In the days before Trump was set to leave the White House in January 2021, the acting defense secretary, Christopher Miller, ordered the NSA to put Ellis in the general counsel post. On the first day of the Biden administration, he was placed on administrative leave by Nakasone, pending the results of an inspector general probe into his appointment.
The inquiry found no untoward influence in the appointment, but also found that Nakasone had acted properly in placing Ellis on leave.
Ellis resigned from the NSA in April 2021. In December of that year, he was named general counsel and corporate secretary at Rumble, a video platform popular with right-wing audiences and creators. Rumble plays a key role in providing hosting services to Truth Social, the social media platform founded by Trump and run by Nunes.
“Michael is a battle-tested lawyer who understands the inner workings of government at the highest levels,” Rumble’s CEO, Chris Pavlovski, said at the time. “His experience at the intersection of technology and law, combined with his maturity of judgment, will serve Rumble well on a wide variety of legal, compliance, and government affairs matters.”
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