Rep. Jimmy Gomez

Yesterday you said that only the President, the only person who can determine what is an imminent threat is the President of the United States.

Do you stand by that statement?

Yes, I do.

Director Ratcliffe, do you agree with that assessment?

That the President is the only person that can determine if something is an imminent threat or not?

The reason why is that if the president can determine and ignore what you're doing, why do you guys even have a job?

Why do you even advise him?

So you're saying tomorrow the president of the United States can say China is an imminent threat.

And then he can take his own, no matter what the intelligence says, he can take his own action.

Well, I think it's because, you know, they want to be around Trump's ARPA, number one.

Is what I'm saying.

Yeah, who knows?

And I think that's the problem is that if they're not allowed to give them

give intelligence and say, yes, this is the highest probability of this will happen or this.

And then he has to make a decision based on that information.

Then what's the point?

Because he's just, he's just freelancing and let's just take it.

Also, let's just hypothetically say that they did provide all this information.

And he said, Oh,

They said, no, it's not an imminent threat.