"Joe Biden’s transition team has picked David Cohen, the former deputy director of the CIA, to reprise his role and help smooth things out for his future boss, career diplomat and intelligence outsider William Burns.
Cohen was considered a frontrunner to become CIA director himself, but Biden chose Burns instead. Cohen’s return to the office he held between 2015 and 2017 was announced on Friday, and since his candidacy does not require a Senate confirmation, he will be able to start on inauguration day.

As deputy for then-CIA Director John Brennan, Cohen was involved in creating the infamous US intelligence assessment of alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election. The document was widely touted as a consensus opinion of 17 agencies, but later turned out to be a product of officials from only three of them – the CIA, FBI, and NSA – “hand-picked” for the task by then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper (technically, his office is an agency of its own and could be counted as the fourth one vouching for the document)"