Trump nominates Jay Clayton to top intelligence post amid uproar over prior, interim pick

(CNN) — President Donald Trump on Thursday nominated Jay Clayton, the US attorney for the Southern District of New York, to be his next director of national intelligence.

“Few people anywhere in the Legal Community are respected at the level of Jay,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social. “I encourage the United States Senate to confirm Jay as soon as possible.”

The selection of Clayton — who served as head of the Securities and Exchange Commission during Trump’s first term — comes amid a firestorm over Trump’s earlier decision to make top housing official Bill Pulte the acting national intelligence chief following the planned departure of Tulsi Gabbard.

The elevation of Pulte, who has no demonstrated national security background, prompted pushback from both Democratic and Republican lawmakers and has endangered the renewal of critical government surveillance powers.

Since Pulte’s selection, Republican lawmakers had urged Trump to quickly name a more qualified permanent nominee.

But Trump’s announcement is unlikely to save the key spy powers authority from its Friday expiration, as Democrats remained largely unmoved following the president’s Truth Social post. Pulte, they said, would still need to be replaced as the acting spy chief to earn their votes in support of a FISA extension.

The White House posted the transmission of Clayton’s nomination to the Senate a little after 5 p.m. Trump said Thursday that he still plans to install Pulte as the acting director.

“He’s only there for a little while, he’s running it for a short while,” the president told reporters in the Oval Office.

Plus, the House has already left town after failing to pass a short-term extension, all but guaranteeing that the authority for the spy powers program will expire.

“Why did the president wait till after the House went home? Pulte has got to go. Period,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told reporters shortly Trump’s announcement on Clayton.

Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told reporters: “I don’t think the president wants this approved. Why wouldn’t he have nominated him yesterday? The House is out of session.”

Speaker Mike Johnson has since suggested he won’t call the House back to Washington to address the program during next week’s prescheduled recess, accusing Democrats of holding it hostage.

Pulte — a wealthy businessman who was confirmed as head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency last year — has been a Trump loyalist with a record of going after many of the president’s biggest perceived political enemies through criminal referrals.

The president indicated to Johnson earlier this week that he wouldn’t back down away from Pulte, despite threats from Democrats to let the key surveillance power lapse over the appointment, two sources briefed on the meeting told CNN.

Trump told some advisers he didn’t want to be held hostage by Democrats and indicated that he believed Republicans could work around them to get a FISA extension.

The president stunned intelligence staffers and lawmakers on Tuesday by announcing Pulte would start his role as acting DNI on June 19 — before Gabbard’s anticipated departure on June 30.

Longtime corporate lawyer

CIA Director John Ratcliffe suggested Clayton for the top position, a source familiar with the decision told CNN.

Trump was looking for someone that was an outsider in the intelligence world as he has sought to shrink the Office of the Director of National intelligence and root out what he sees as the “deep state.”

His nomination of Clayton comes after Manhattan’s top federal prosecutor has appeared on CNBC in recent weeks defending Trump’s settlement with the IRS and stoking the administration’s claims of election fraud in California.

On Monday, for example, he was grilled about the distinction between state laws that make California’s vote tabulation a slow process and actual evidence of fraud, saying, “There’s a great phrase, ‘opportunity for fraud.’”

Nicholas Biase, a spokesman for the US attorney’s office, said, “Jay Clayton will remain U.S. Attorney through confirmation.”

A longtime corporate attorney, Clayton is well known within Republican circles. In the year that he’s served as US attorney, he has predominantly focused the office on prosecuting violent crime and drug-related cases — both priorities for Trump. He he was one of the signatories on the indictment against then-Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro that was unsealed in coordination with his capture in a US raid.

Clayton has tapped into the office’s long-standing reputation for policing Wall Street by focusing on insider trading in prediction markets — a fast-growing industry — with the office announcing two indictments.

His tenure has avoided the controversy that has plagued other US attorneys who have been accused by courts and others as acting politically. And that stable leadership has generally won him support from the rank and file.

However, some lawyers within the office were frustrated that he didn’t stop the firing of Maurene Comey, a successful and well-respected prosecutor who worked on some of SDNY’s highest-profile investigations, including of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell and its prosecution of Sean “Diddy” Combs. (Comey was fired last summer by officials in Washington and has sued DOJ alleging it was because her father is former FBI Director James Comey, who has clashed with Trump.)

But Clayton has kept the office largely insulated from the whims of Washington.

Former Attorney General Pam Bondi directed Clayton to investigate Epstein’s ties to prominent Democrats, which Trump publicly requested. Clayton appeared to quietly sidestep the demand, saying later that he would investigate any new leads.

Clayton was the first US attorney for SDNY in recent history to lead the office who had not previously served as a prosecutor. He built his career as a consigliere to banking and investment companies at the prominent New York law firm Sullivan & Cromwell and has represented several board members.

Clayton’s name first surfaced for the top job in SDNY after Trump fired then-US attorney Geoffrey Berman during his first term, but the job ultimately did not go to him. Then, after Trump was reelected, Clayton’s name bubbled up for a number of Cabinet positions.

During the presidential transition, Clayton expressed interest in running the CIA, according to a person familiar with his interest. He interviewed for attorney general, a position that initially went to Bondi before he was picked to lead SDNY.

Clayton has golfed with Trump and his former law firm is now representing Trump in several court battles, including appealing his criminal conviction in New York.

The Senate did not advance his nomination, but Clayton was later voted in by the district judges.

On Thursday, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle indicated openness to Clayton’s nomination, with Warner — the Virginia Democrat — telling reporters, “I have great respect for Jay Clayton.”

Senate Majority Leader John Thune said he wants to move on the nomination as quickly as possible, noting that Clayton has been confirmed previously by the Senate.

“We will try and get him up and get him considered as quickly as possible,” the South Dakota Republican said.

Turnover at DNI

If confirmed, Clayton would become Trump’s second permanent chief of national intelligence after Gabbard, who announced her resignation last month, citing her husband’s diagnosis of a rare form of bone cancer.

Yet the office he’s now poised to inherit has faced a tumultuous several months rife with internal turf wars, high-profile resignations and the prospect of severe downsizing.

Trump originally selected Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman, as his top intelligence official thanks to her non-interventionist, “America First” ideology that had pushed her away from the Democratic Party and into the MAGA fold.

But her isolationist tendencies quickly put her at odds with Trump’s military actions against Iran and Venezuela. She came under additional scrutiny following the abrupt resignation of Joe Kent, who headed the National Counterterrorism Center under her command, over his objections to the war with Iran.

Months before announcing her resignation, Gabbard was routinely sidelined from some of the biggest foreign policy decisions of Trump’s second term.

Instead, much of her focus revolved around rooting out actors she thought were part of the so-called deep state — people in the intelligence community who the president suspected were working against his interests.

The DNI role, created after 9/11, oversees the 18 agencies that make up the intelligence community and was designed to avoid another catastrophic intelligence failure in which spy agencies don’t share information with each other.

This story has been updated with additional information.

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CNN’s Kristen Holmes, Alayna Treene, Zachary Cohen, Hannah Rabinowitz, Aileen Graef, Annie Grayer, Morgan Rimmer, Lauren Fox, Ted Barrett and Ellis Kim contributed to this report.