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Ratcliffe and Patel Testify at the Senate Intelligence Worldwide Threats Hearing, Mar. 25, 2025

March 25, 2025 · CBS News · 2:04:55

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What happened

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence held its annual Worldwide Threats hearing on March 25, 2025. The witness panel was the leadership of the intelligence community: Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, FBI Director Kash Patel, National Security Agency Director Gen. Timothy Haugh, and Defense Intelligence Agency Director Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse, according to CBS News, which carried the hearing in full.

The hearing came one day after news broke that senior administration officials had discussed plans for U.S. strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen in a Signal group chat that also included Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic, as CBS News reported in its description of the hearing. Members of the committee questioned the witnesses about their participation in the Signal chat as well as the threats posed by Russia and China and the intelligence community’s assessment of emerging threats, according to Lawfare’s summary of the hearing. Ratcliffe told the committee that his use of Signal was permissible and confirmed that the communications at issue contained no classified information, as reported from the hearing; Vice Chairman Mark Warner criticized what he called the panel’s unwillingness to acknowledge or apologize for the episode.

Why it matters

The Worldwide Threats hearing is the intelligence community’s one regular public accounting each year, and for Ratcliffe — whose CIA tenure runs largely out of public view — it is the fullest on-the-record statement of his agency’s threat picture. For Patel, the panel appearance pairs the FBI’s domestic mission with the foreign-threat assessment in a single record. This 2025 edition is also the hearing at which the Signal episode first put the new intelligence leadership’s communications practices under sworn, public questioning.

Scoreboard watch

The panel’s March 25, 2025 threat assessments — on Russia, China, and emerging threats, as presented by Director Gabbard for the intelligence community — are the baseline statements this chronicle checks the community’s later public assessments against.

Sources: Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Worldwide Threats hearing, March 25, 2025 (full hearing as carried by CBS News, embedded above); Lawfare No Bull, March 27, 2025, summary of the hearing; Associated Press, March 25, 2025, on the week’s back-to-back threats hearings. All characterizations as stated by the witnesses and committee members at the hearing.