Trump's DNI Pick Jay Clayton Won't Say Biden Won 2020, Senators Call Answers 'Disqualifying'

Jay Clayton sat before the Senate Intelligence Committee Wednesday, July 15, and would not say Joe Biden won the 2020 election. He said Biden was "certified." He said he's "not an election denier." He would not say Biden won.

Biden won. He got 306 electoral votes. He got 81 million ballots. Courts across the country, including judges Trump himself appointed, threw out every serious legal challenge to that result. This is the most audited election in American history, according to Democracy Docket. Clayton knows this. He's a former SEC chair and the sitting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. He's not a dummy who doesn't know how to read an electoral map.

So why won't he say it? Because the man nominating him has spent six years insisting the election was stolen, and Clayton wants the job.

The hearing got heated fast

Sen. Mark Kelly asked Clayton directly why Biden was certified winner. Clayton answered: "He had the most electoral votes, followed our process, and was declared the winner" — stopping short, again, of saying Biden won, according to The Guardian.

Kelly's response cut to the point: "If you can't disagree with him when he's not in the room, will you be able to disagree with him when you are sitting across from him in the Oval Office or the Situation Room?"

Sen. Jon Ossoff went further. "You refuse to answer a basic question about who won a presidential election, but you ask to lead America's intelligence community?" he said, according to Nextgov/FCW. "Isn't it humiliating to be unable to answer this question, to have to indulge the president's delusions?"

Clayton's response, according to Democracy Docket: "I'm not going to engage in the theater."

Sen. Angus King told Clayton his non-answer was itself disqualifying. "One of your qualifications is you told us you're going to tell the truth to power and you won't even answer a simple question to tell the truth to power," King said.

The Gabbard raid question

Ossoff also pressed Clayton on whether he knew that former DNI Tulsi Gabbard personally showed up for an FBI search of a Fulton County, Georgia, election office earlier this year. Clayton said he only learned about it from Ossoff himself, in a private meeting days before the hearing, according to CNBC.

Ossoff asked him point blank: is it appropriate for the director of national intelligence to oversee domestic search warrants at election facilities? Clayton didn't answer that either.

The DNI's job, as Clayton himself said repeatedly in his testimony, is supposed to be foreign intelligence, not domestic election policing. If the last DNI was showing up at state election office raids, and the nominee to replace her doesn't know that happened or won't say whether it was appropriate, that's worth asking about.

The other side of it

Clayton isn't wrong that election administration has real problems. Before his June 11 nomination, Clayton told CNBC, "On the [election] integrity side, we are doing an absolutely terrible job, and the American people are right to question it. How come we can have an audit trail in every other aspect of our lives that's important?" according to Nextgov.

That's a fair point. Chain-of-custody questions, audit trails, voter roll maintenance are legitimate process questions that don't require calling the 2020 result fraudulent. King pushed back on Clayton for blending the two, asking him to share any evidence of "significant" voter fraud. Clayton didn't produce any in the hearing. Wanting better audit systems and refusing to say who won a certified election are two different things, and Clayton conflated them under oath.

What's actually new here

This hearing happened one day before Trump's scheduled Thursday night primetime address, in which he's expected to unveil newly declassified intelligence the administration says shows foreign interference in the 2020 race, according to The Guardian and Democracy Docket. Acting DNI Bill Pulte reportedly pushed for that speech. Clayton's confirmation fight is unfolding in the same week the administration is set to relitigate 2020 publicly, with the nominee to run the intelligence community unwilling to state the basic outcome of that race.

The Senate Intelligence Committee, chaired by Tom Cotton, is expected to vote on Clayton's nomination next week, according to CNBC. Cotton reportedly used his own questioning time not to press Clayton on the election answers but to get him to recommit to downsizing ODNI, a priority Pulte and Gabbard both pursued. Given the Republican majority, Clayton remains likely to be confirmed regardless of Wednesday's exchanges. The open question is whether any Republican senators join Democrats in treating his answers as a genuine confirmation problem, or whether the vote proceeds along straight party lines.