Raise your hand if you want to re-litigate the 2020 election.
Jay Clayton, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, just finished testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee to be the next Director of National Intelligence, a powerful position overseeing all 18 intel agencies. And whether or not Biden won in 2020 became the key theme, not U.S. adversaries or terrorism or even drug cartels.
U.S. officials rushed to make Clayton’s hearing happen. That’s because there had been bipartisan condemnation of President Donald Trump’s acting director pick, loyalist Bill Pulte, who has exactly zero national security experience and has been firing personnel since he started on June 19th.
As a federal attorney, Clayton has some noteworthy overlaps. He reviewed Epstein files, overseen the indictment of Nicolas Maduro, and prosecuted a gamut of bad guys to include terrorists and cartel members. His selection earned bipartisan support, and a sigh of relief.
Sitting before the lawmakers, Clayton started off by expressing his humility for the nomination. Tapping into his background as former Securities and Exchange Commission chair, he said the intel community should pay closer attention to economic impacts of global events. And he vowed to ensure that Trump and policymakers receive information in a “timely, objective, and independent manner.”
But when Sen. Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat, swiftly asked him if he denies that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, Clayton could only say that Biden was certified as the president. That is not the same thing.
Democrats, to include Senators Angus King, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Mark Kelly, soon piled on. Clayton simply could not say the words. He promised not to declassify intelligence for political purposes and said he’d inform the committee of any plans to suspend intelligence-sharing with Ukraine… but he could not say that Biden won in 2020.
Evidently, he did not want to upset his boss. And that led Democrats to question whether he could speak truth to power. (Recall that Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse was ousted as Defense Intelligence Agency director last year, after leaked intelligence contradicted Trump’s public remarks that U.S. strikes had obliterated Iran’s nuclear program.)
What we are seeing is that the appearance of things sometimes matters more than the thing itself. Even a former intel official tells me that Pulte’s recent post about a “third round” of ODNI cuts was not conveyed to managers. They felt it was more about him “performing for the White House.” (His first post on X as acting DNI happened to be a glam shot of Trump and an American flag icon.)
To be sure, intel officers still worry about cuts. But many think Clayton “can’t be worse than Pulte.”
More on all of this in the video report. Also, I am starting to use YouTube more, so I’ll be highlighting that and you can subscribe to my channel to see more of my work.
