The Trump administration’s nominee for the country’s top-ranking intelligence post, Jay Clayton, refused to say who won the 2020 election at his confirmation hearing Thursday, hedging on questions that could put him at odds with the president.
Clayton’s halting answers frustrated Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee, who questioned whether he would be ready to tell the president the unvarnished truth as director of national intelligence or to safeguard spy agencies from political manipulation.
“It seems that folks who are nominated for these positions just fundamentally refuse to disagree with things that the president says,” said Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., after Clayton declined to say if Joe Biden won the 2020 election.
“The problem I have with this is he isn’t in the room today,” Kelly said, referring to the president. “You’re going to be in a room with him. Many times. And at times you should have a difference of opinion, and if you can’t disagree with him when he’s not in the room, are you going to be able to disagree with him when you’re sitting across from him in the Oval Office or the Situation Room?”
Although Clayton is likely to be confirmed as the next intelligence chief by the Senate’s Republican majority, his testimony underscored concerns among Democrats that the president and his administration could try to use intelligence or law enforcement agencies to interfere with state governments overseeing upcoming midterm elections in November.
The president is due to deliver remarks on Thursday evening that will focus in part on election integrity and his administration’s findings around the 2020 election, NBC News reported. Clayton told senators he had not been consulted about the scheduled speech.
A White House task force has collected a trove of documents from U.S. intelligence agencies with plans to declassify some of them, providing Trump a potential opportunity to renew baseless claims about fraud in past elections, NBC News has reported.
At the hearing, Clayton, now the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, was asked repeatedly who won the 2020 presidential vote by Democratic lawmakers and would only say that Joe Biden was “certified” as president.
“I’m not going to get into that,” Clayton said after being asked by Sen. Angus King of Maine.
“Who won the 2020 election? Pretty simple question,” King asked again.
Clayton responded: “Joe Biden was certified as president. . . He went through his process. We went through our electoral process.”
King said that Clayton had not answered the question and pressed him again. Clayton said he was at the hearing to discuss his nomination for intelligence director.
“I’m here to talk about my qualifications,” Clayton said.
King responded: “One of your qualifications is you told us you’re going to tell the truth to power and you won’t answer a very simple question.”
Clayton also struggled to answer questions about the president’s decision to order the former intelligence chief, Tulsi Gabbard, to be present at a FBI raid of an election center last year in Atlanta, Georgia. He said he had not thought about the raid recently and was not aware that Trump instructed Gabbard to attend the raid where agents seized ballots from the 2020 election.
Asked by Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., about the intelligence director’s presence at the raid, Clayton said that when the senator raised the episode in a meeting on Wednesday, “it was the first time that, in my recollection, I’ve thought about it recently. Now, was I aware of it before?”
Ossoff then asked if Clayton would comply with a similar request from the president.
“If the White House chief of staff or the president asks you to travel somewhere across the United States and oversee the execution of a domestic search warrant on a sensitive election facility, will you do it?” Ossoff asked. “Is that appropriate for the director of national intelligence?”
Clayton said it was “a hypothetical” question.
Ossoff called Clayton’s answers about the 2020 election and the FBI raid on the election center in Georgia “disqualifying” and accused him of failing to be “forthright” with the intelligence committee. Ossoff was elected in 2020 after a runoff election that helped tip the political balance of the Senate.
Congress created the national intelligence director’s position in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, with the aim of ensuring that information was shared across the country’s spy agencies.
The director oversees 18 spy services, weighs in on secret intelligence budgets and serves as the president’s principal intelligence adviser.
Clayton, who spent most of his career as a corporate lawyer, does not have extensive experience in the intelligence world. But as a federal prosecutor, he oversaw an office that handles cases with national security implications, including narco-trafficking, terrorism and corruption.
As U.S. attorney, Clayton oversaw the Justice Department’s indictment of former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on drug trafficking charges. Maduro has pleaded not guilty.
Clayton also has praised his office for the prosecution of the former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was convicted of cocaine trafficking.
But when asked by Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I, Clayton declined to discuss President Trump’s decision last year to pardon Hernandez.
“I’m not going to get into the pardon process here,” said Clayton, adding that by law a president has “absolute” power when it comes to pardons.
Lawmakers also grilled Clayton about his past comments questioning the integrity of America’s elections, demanding that he provide evidence to back up his remarks.
Clayton said that the way the government collected data for elections needed to be improved.
When Sen. King asked if he believed there was a voter fraud problem in the U.S., Clayton said: “I don’t think we can say definitively whether there is or is not until we have better processes.”
Democrats on the committee asked Clayton to explain his approval of subpoenas issued last week to reporters from The New York Times after the newspaper published articles about security concerns involving the new Air Force One. Some of the subpoenas were delivered by federal agents who showed up at the journalists’ doorsteps.
Clayton said he was committed to upholding the First Amendment and the role of the press, and that his office seeks “to limit, to the greatest extent possible, any intrusion into the operation of the free press.”
He said his office consulted with the Justice Department according to regular “protocols,” but Clayton did not say whether there were discussions with the White House about the case.
If confirmed, Clayton would replace the acting director of national intelligence, Bill Pulte, a political partisan without national security experience. Trump picked Pulte to succeed Tulsi Gabbard after she said she was resigning, citing her husband’s cancer diagnosis.
Pulte earned Trump’s approval as head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, where he launched investigations into the president’s perceived political enemies.
Republican lawmakers hope to see Clayton confirmed to try to break a deadlock in Congress over an extension of the government’s electronic surveillance authority. Democrats have warned that they will not back reauthorizing the spying tool unless Pulte is replaced as intelligence chief.
Trump nominated Clayton last month but then demanded that the Senate Intelligence Committee call off a confirmation hearing scheduled for June 17 only hours before it was set to take place. He said he first wanted Clayton’s successor as the federal prosecutor in New York, James McDonald, to be confirmed.
The Senate has not yet confirmed McDonald to the powerful prosecutor’s job in New York, but he has been named deputy U.S. attorney to oversee a period of “transition,” according to the Justice Department.
Before the hearing, key Democrats, who are typically at odds with the White House over Trump’s nominees, praised Clayton as a positive and more conventional choice. But congressional aides said that Clayton’s testimony Thursday clearly went over badly with Democrats on the committee and it could mean his nomination will only attract support from Republican lawmakers.
The committee will vote on the nomination and if it passes, it will head to the full senate.
