Before his Senate confirmation as DNI, Clayton — then the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York — personally signed the subpoenas compelling New York Times reporters to testify before a grand jury over their reporting on security gaps in Trump’s Qatari jet. Press-freedom groups called it a direct abuse of subpoena power against established DOJ guidelines; a federal judge later forced the government to withdraw those subpoenas after challenging “almost every facet” of its justification. Clayton was confirmed 51–47 over explicit Democratic warnings that he could politicize intelligence at Trump’s direction — concerns rooted in exactly the behavior he’d already shown before even taking the job. Current and former officials now say the most likely outcome of his tenure is simply overseeing the intelligence community’s obsolescence, after Trump’s prior acting DNI, a housing official with zero intelligence background, spent months gutting its staff. The nation’s top intelligence official arrived with a documented record of using legal power to intimidate journalists, not protect the country.