Crunch Time: Any enthusiasm Democrats once had for Jay Clayton to head U.S. intelligence evaporated last week with the nominee’s wishy-washy testimony at his confirmation hearing, where, like other nominees President Trump has sent to Capitol Hill, he not only refused to state plainly that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, but left open the possibility that he might (improperly) get involved in vote counting like his predecessor Tulsi Gabbard. “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,” MS NOW’s David Rohde reported. With the extended absence of the mysteriously ailing Sen. Mitch McConnell, that gives Republicans only a three vote margin to push Clayton over the finish line. Trump didn’t make it easier for them, “delivering a TV speech from the White House “in which he again tried to cast doubts on that election and amplified debunked theories about Biden’s win,” the A.P. reported. “Clayton told senators that he had no involvement with that speech,” which the president amplified again in his crudely partisan remarks at the White House Correspondents Association dinner Friday night.
Whither Ratcliffe? Trump’s continuing assault on the 2020 election results ostensibly puts CIA Director John Ratcliffe in an awkward position, since he was director of National Intelligence during the 2020 elections and oversaw its classified formal assessment that there were “no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process in the 2020 US elections, including voter registration, casting ballots, vote tabulation, or reporting results.” Not only that, the IC investigation found that “Russian President Putin authorized, and a range of Russian government organizations conducted, influence operations aimed at denigrating President Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party, supporting former President Trump, undermining public confidence in the electoral process, and exacerbating sociopolitical divisions in the US”—another finding that Trump vehemently disputes. In his TV speech, Trump also alleged that China manipulated voting to Biden’s advantage—another falsehood not only devoid of evidence but technically impossible, according to countless state and federal election officials, judges and elections experts. China debated getting involved, the U.S. intelligence investigation found, but stayed on the sidelines.
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