WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence, Jay Clayton, is likely to get a friendly reception from lawmakers Wednesday at his confirmation hearing as both parties are eager for him to take over from the current acting intelligence chief.
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Both Democratic and Republican lawmakers see Clayton, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, as a relatively safe pair of hands to replace Bill Pulte, a political partisan who came to the job without any clear national security experience.
The Senate Intelligence Committee will hold the confirmation hearing amid growing concern among Democrats that Trump and his administration could try to use intelligence or law enforcement agencies to interfere with state governments overseeing midterm elections in November.
A White House task force has collected thousands of pages of documents from intelligence agencies with plans to declassify some of them, providing Trump with a potential opportunity to renew baseless claims about fraud in past elections, NBC News has reported.
Trump is due to deliver remarks Thursday evening that will focus in part on election integrity and his administration’s findings around the 2020 election.
Clayton is expected to face questions from Democrats in particular about how he sees the intelligence director’s role with regard to U.S. elections and whether he would be willing to provide unvarnished assessments to Trump.
He told CNBC last month that the U.S. is “doing an absolutely terrible job” of ensuring the integrity of elections, “and the American people are right to question it.”
Citing California’s election laws allowing registered voters to cast ballots by mail, Clayton claimed that “it makes the opportunity for fraud so much greater, when that is not necessary.”
Election experts and California officials say there is no evidence of widespread fraud in California’s elections, as Trump has asserted. And as for the 2020 election, no evidence has emerged showing widespread fraud, as Trump has claimed. Dozens of lawsuits seeking to overturn the election results were dismissed or dropped.
Congress created the national intelligence director’s position in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the U.S., 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’s office also reviewed many of the Justice Department’s files related to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein after Congress passed a law requiring the release of the documents.
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.
Senior Democrats, who are often at odds with the White House over Trump’s nominees, have praised Clayton as a positive and more conventional choice. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, has called Clayton “a capable public servant” with the right temperament.
Trump selected Pulte as acting director of national intelligence in early June 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 Trump’s perceived political enemies.
Trump has said he wanted Pulte to continue to slash the workforce at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence before Clayton takes over. While she was director, Gabbard cut hundreds of positions and moved some teams to other intelligence agencies.
