Jay Clayton Refuses to Say Biden Won. He Wants to Run 18 Intelligence Agencies.
There is a sentence that should not be controversial in 2026. The sentence is: Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election. He received 81 million votes, the most in American history. He won 306 electoral votes. He was certified by every state, confirmed by Congress, and inaugurated on January 20, 2021. He served as president for four years. These are facts. They are not in dispute among any credentialed election official, court, or audit body in the United States.
Jay Clayton cannot say them.
President Donald Trump’s pick to head the nation’s intelligence agencies struggled to win Democratic support in a contentious confirmation hearing Wednesday where he clashed repeatedly with Democrats over the 2020 election. Democrats asked Jay Clayton over and over again whether former President Joe Biden won the election and defeated Trump. Echoing many of Trump’s nominees, Clayton said many times that the election was “certified” for Biden, declining to say outright that the Democrat won.
“Your answers lack credibility. Your testimony lacks credibility,” Ossoff said. On multiple occasions during the roughly two-hour hearing, Clayton declined to answer who won the 2020 election, instead saying: “I am not an election denier. Joe Biden was certified.”
I am not an election denier. Joe Biden was certified. These two sentences are doing a great deal of work. The first is a declaration of identity — I am not a thing. The second is a passive construction carefully designed to avoid an active claim — Biden was certified, by unnamed parties, in a process Clayton declines to endorse, for reasons he declines to explain.
Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the committee, asked whether Clayton denied that Biden won the 2020 election. “I’m not an election denier,” Clayton said. “Joe Biden was certified as the president of the United States.”
He is not an election denier. He simply cannot say the election produced a winner. He is not a flat-earther. He simply cannot confirm the shape of the planet.
Why It Matters
Democrats are concerned that President Trump has and will continue to use the intelligence community to try to prop up his claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
This concern is not paranoid. On Thursday night, the president is scheduled to deliver a prime-time address presenting declassified intelligence about foreign interference in the 2020 election. Their focus on questioning the nominee about the 2020 election came in part because Mr. Trump is scheduled to deliver a prime-time address on Thursday that is expected to raise more questions about the results.
The man Trump wants running 18 intelligence agencies — the agencies that produced the intelligence Trump will present on Thursday — cannot say Biden won. The acting DNI Bill Pulte, who Trump appointed and who reportedly pressed Trump to deliver the Thursday address, is being replaced by Clayton, who also cannot say Biden won.
Clayton said he doesn’t think we can say definitively whether there is or is not voter fraud “until we have better processes.”
The Director of National Intelligence oversees the CIA, the NSA, the DIA, and 15 other intelligence agencies. He has access to every secret the United States government possesses. He will produce intelligence assessments that shape foreign policy, military decisions, and the president’s understanding of reality.
The man Trump wants in that role thinks we cannot definitively say whether there is voter fraud in American elections until we have better processes. After dozens of audits, hundreds of court cases, and the conclusions of his own party’s secretaries of state in every contested state.
The intelligence community has a term for someone who tells powerful people what they want to hear rather than what the evidence shows. The term is not “director.”