WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump on Wednesday derailed the confirmation process of his own nominee to head the nation’s intelligence agencies, an extraordinary move that upended Senate efforts to renew a crucial surveillance program that expired last week and fueled fresh tensions with fellow Republicans on Capitol Hill.
In an overnight social media post from the Group of Seven summit in France, Trump declared he was delaying the nomination of federal prosecutor Jay Clayton as director of national intelligence just hours ahead of his scheduled hearing, despite bipartisan praise for the nominee and Republican efforts to speed him through the confirmation process this week.
Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Tom Cotton, R-Ark., said Republicans would go ahead with the Clayton hearing anyway, “unless the president directs him not to appear or withdraws his nomination," but later he postponed it, saying it was “regrettable” that Trump had directed Clayton not to appear.
“Mr. Clayton is a patriot and a highly qualified nominee, as the president has said repeatedly,” Cotton said. “While today’s hearing is now unfortunately postponed, I look forward to proceeding with his confirmation in the near future.”
Trump's attempt to delay Clayton makes it more likely that his temporary pick for the intelligence job, top housing official Bill Pulte, will take over when outgoing director Tulsi Gabbard leaves office on Friday to spend time with her husband as he fights cancer. Republicans and Democrats in Congress have sharply criticized Pulte, a Trump loyalist who has no known national security experience and has used his current administration perch to target perceived adversaries of the president.
That resistance that last week forced Trump to turn to Clayton, but he has continued to defend Pulte, calling him “fair” and “talented” in his social media post.
Caught in the middle is the renewal of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, bipartisan legislation that aims to prevent terrorist attacks by monitoring the communications of targeted foreigners located outside the United States. Democrats had said they would not provide the necessary votes to pass the bill unless Pulte's temporary appointment was withdrawn, and the current authority expired last week.
Further complicating matters, Trump said in his social media post that he would not sign the FISA renewal without his legislation to require proof of citizenship for all voters — which does not have enough votes to pass the Senate — and that he does not want to remove Clayton from his current position as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York until his replacement, James McDonald, is approved.
Trump's post sent Senate Republicans scrambling, and it was unclear if they would challenge Trump's attempt to push back Clayton's nomination or try move it forward.
“We’ll just have to take it a day at a time until we get more clarity on what the White House position is on this,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., told reporters Wednesday morning. He said he didn't know why Trump was holding up the effort.
“Good question,” he said.
Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, called Trump’s post an “extraordinary display of dysfunction from a president who seems determined to turn America’s national security into a political bargaining chip.”
“The biggest obstacle to resolving these issues has not been Senate Democrats or Senate Republicans,” Warner said. “It has been the chaos and confusion coming from the White House itself.”
Key surveillance program could be affected
Hanging in the balance is not only the identity of the nominee but also Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
National security officials across both major political parties have for years described Section 702 as vital for gathering intelligence that can disrupt terror attacks and espionage operations, though some lawmakers and civil liberties advocates have raised concerns over the government's use of information about Americans that is incidentally collected through the program.
Trump's post suggested that debate to revive Section 702 could be indefinitely postponed. As Democrats pushed back on Pulte, Republicans have sounded the alarm about the government operating without congressional authorization of the powerful spy tool.
A court order from March certified that the program could continue for another 12 months, though it's possible that communications companies could challenge the government's authority to force them to cooperate and share data.
Trump's delay of Clayton “shows he has no interest in getting FISA done,” said Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. "He has pulled the rug out from under his own Republican colleagues, and he’s doing everything he can to thwart it.”
Who is Clayton?
Clayton, a chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission during Trump’s first term, has spent the last 14 months as the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, one of the Justice Department’s premier posts.
His office during that time facilitated the unsealing of thousands of pages of court records from the prosecutions of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, documents that were made public as part of the Justice Department’s release of records related to the late sex offender and his longtime confidant.
Clayton has also overseen the prosecution of former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and Maduro’s wife, Cilia Flores, on drug trafficking charges.
Epstein died by suicide in a New York jail cell in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. Maxwell was convicted of luring teenage girls to be sexually abused by Epstein but insists she's innocent. Maduro and his wife have protested their capture and said they're not guilty.
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Associated Press writers Kevin Freking, Joey Cappelletti and Lisa Mascaro in Washington, Aamer Madhani in Evian-les-Bains, France, and Darlene Superville in Geneva contributed to this report.
