In early June, when Donald Trump announced that he wanted Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, to succeed Tulsi Gabbard as the director of national intelligence, it seemed easy to imagine congressional Democrats pushing back against the nomination in a serious way.
After all, not only does Clayton fail to meet the statutory qualifications for the position, but he’s also spent recent months targeting the president’s political opponents and defending absurdities such as the administration’s defunct $1.766 billion compensation fund.
But almost immediately, Democrats largely had the opposite reaction. Relieved to see Gabbard go, many key Democratic officials said they saw Clayton as a credible figure who would likely garner bipartisan support.
So much for that idea.
On Tuesday, Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, announced that the panel had voted, 9-8, to advance Clayton’s nomination to the floor for a confirmation vote. (Because the Intelligence Committee often operates under secrecy, the vote was held behind closed doors.) The New York Times and Politico separately confirmed that Clayton received unanimous support from the panel’s GOP majority and unanimous opposition from the Democratic minority.
So what happened? What did Clayton do to alienate Democratic members who, just one month ago, were otherwise inclined to support his nomination? As it turns out, we know the answer: His confirmation hearing changed everything. MS NOW’s David Rohde reported last week:
Jay Clayton, President Donald Trump’s nominee to be director of national intelligence, appeared to speak to an audience of one in his confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill on Wednesday. That person was not one of the Republican or Democratic senators who asked Clayton questions. It was, by all appearances, Trump.
In question after question, Clayton made his loyalty to the president clear. That approach appeared to unnerve Democrats, who predicted that Trump would ask Clayton to help him improperly sway, discredit or steal this fall’s midterm elections.
In a series of painfully awkward exchanges, Clayton, after insisting he’s not an “election denier,” repeatedly refused to say who was the rightful winner of the 2020 presidential election.
At one point, Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona tried to explain to the nominee, “You’re going to be in a room with [the president] 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 Situation Room?”
It’s an underappreciated point. The director of national intelligence, no matter who’s in the position, will sometimes have to tell the president facts that he won’t like — because they’re true and reality is important in this line of work. Over the course of a few hours, Clayton made clear that he simply wasn’t prepared to say things that Trump wouldn’t want to hear, which was effectively disqualifying given the circumstances.
Barring some dramatic surprises, he’ll soon be confirmed by the Senate’s GOP majority anyway. But Clayton had an opportunity to move forward with broad, bipartisan backing. He blew it by putting Trump’s conspiracy theories and delicate sensibilities above the truth.
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