Senate Confirms Jay Clayton After He Demonstrates Strategic Ignorance
The Senate confirmed Jay Clayton as director of national intelligence Tuesday in a 51-47 party-line vote, elevating the former Securities and Exchange Commission chairman after he demonstrated Washington’s most prized intelligence skill: refusing to acknowledge information already available to the public. During his confirmation hearing, Clayton said the 2020 election was “certified” for Joe Biden but declined to say Biden won it, displaying the disciplined uncertainty needed to coordinate 18 intelligence agencies without becoming trapped by observable reality.
President Donald Trump celebrated the confirmation as a decisive victory over facts, which administration officials said have long distorted intelligence by remaining true regardless of the president’s preferences. “Jay is extremely smart because when someone asks who won an election, he knows the correct answer is whatever keeps everybody employed,” Trump said. “That is intelligence at the highest level, and frankly some people know far too many things.” White House aides said Clayton’s refusal to identify an election winner showed he could distinguish raw information from conclusions that might upset the person receiving them.
Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Tom Cotton praised Clayton’s national security résumé, which includes regulating securities, prosecuting financial crimes and surviving several consecutive questions that required a noun after the verb “won.” Democrats argued that the nation’s top intelligence official should identify reality before advising policymakers about it. Republicans rejected that standard as an obsolete doctrine from the pre-loyalty era, when analysts were permitted to reach conclusions before checking whether the conclusions were politically convenient.
Officials said Clayton’s first priority will be modernizing the President’s Daily Brief into a more resilient format. Future assessments will replace dangerous declarative sentences with phrases such as “events were certified,” “sources have alleged weather” and “multiple perspectives exist regarding whether the missile launched.” Analysts will also classify basic chronology to prevent hostile governments from learning what happened before the White House decides what happened. Clayton’s confirmation therefore establishes a new governing principle for American intelligence: the less an official is willing to know, the more qualified he is to know everything.
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