Mike Waltz, U.S. national security adviser, is shown during a meeting at the White House in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday.

WASHINGTON ― US President Donald Trump’s CIA director, facing heat for participating in a discussion of an impending military strike on Yemen on a publicly available messaging app, on Tuesday blamed President Joe Biden’s administration for allowing the practice — an assertion that Biden White House officials denied.

John Ratcliffe, testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that CIA officials loaded the Signal messaging program onto his work computer on his first day on the job and told him that it was a “permissible work use” for certain purposes. “That is a practice that preceded the current administration to the Biden administration,” he said.

Former Biden officials, though, said that Signal was never permitted on their government phones.

“We were not allowed to have any messaging apps on our work phones,” said one former top national security official on the condition of anonymity. “And under no circumstances were unclassified messaging apps allowed to be used for transmission of classified material. This is misdirection at its worst.”

Ratcliffe was never asked during the hearing whether he monitored the group chat from that work computer at the secure CIA headquarters or from a phone outside the building. Other Biden officials called his explanation of his work computer a “deflection.”

Ratcliffe was among some dozen and a half top Trump administration officials who participated in a

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