THE MAN WHO WILL KNOW EVERY SECRET ABOUT EVERY AMERICAN JUST GOT CONFIRMED — AND HE WOULDN'T EVEN ANSWER ONE SIMPLE QUESTION
THE MAN WHO WILL KNOW EVERY SECRET ABOUT EVERY AMERICAN JUST GOT CONFIRMED — AND HE WOULDN'T EVEN ANSWER ONE SIMPLE QUESTION
Every phone call you make. Every text you send. Every email sitting in your inbox right now. The person who just got confirmed to oversee the entire United States intelligence apparatus — all 18 spy agencies, every surveillance program, every classified database that touches your digital life — refused to answer the simplest question in American politics under oath: who won the 2020 election?
That man's name is Jay Clayton. And as of Tuesday night, he is your Director of National Intelligence.
The Senate confirmed him 51 to 47. Every single Republican voted yes. Every single Democrat voted no. Not one senator crossed party lines — not one — on a nomination that will determine who controls the largest, most powerful intelligence infrastructure on the planet for the foreseeable future.
Two weeks ago, Clayton sat before the Senate Intelligence Committee and was asked point-blank by Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia whether Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election. Clayton's answer — delivered with the practiced evasiveness of a man who knew exactly what he was doing — was that Biden had been "certified" as the winner. Not that he won. Not that the election was legitimate. That he was "certified."
Ossoff didn't let it go. "You refuse to answer a basic question about who won a presidential election, but you ask to lead America's intelligence community," the senator told Clayton directly. "Isn't it humiliating to be unable to answer this question — to have to indulge the president's delusions?"
Clayton insisted he is not an "election denier." He said he has no reason to believe the 2020 election was rigged. But he would not — under oath, in front of cameras, with the nation watching — say the four words that would have made this entire confirmation process bipartisan: "Joe Biden won."
Four words. That's all it would have taken. Senator Mark Warner, the Intelligence Committee's vice chairman and a Democrat who had initially been open to supporting Clayton, said afterward that he was "very disappointed" with the performance. Warner had praised Clayton's qualifications beforehand — his record as SEC chairman, his tenure as the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, his broad bipartisan appeal. All of it evaporated in the space of a single hearing because one man couldn't bring himself to state an objective, verified, constitutionally certified fact.
And now that man oversees the NSA, the CIA, the FBI's intelligence division, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and thirteen other agencies whose combined reach touches every corner of American life — from the satellites tracking your location to the data centers storing your communications to the algorithms scanning your online activity for patterns that someone, somewhere, has decided are worth watching.
This isn't abstract. This isn't a Washington process story. The Director of National Intelligence is the single person who decides what intelligence reaches the President's desk every morning. He's the person who determines what threats are real and which ones are noise. He's the person who stands between you and the misuse of a surveillance infrastructure so vast that most Americans have no idea how much of their daily lives it touches.
And as of tonight, that person is a man who was asked whether democracy produced a legitimate result four years ago and answered with a bureaucratic technicality instead of the truth.
But Clayton isn't the most alarming part of this story. The most alarming part is who he's replacing — and what that person did to the intelligence community in the weeks before Clayton took over. What happened inside those agencies while America wasn't paying attention may be the most dangerous thing that's occurred in Washington all year.
May you like
👉 CONTINUE READING — PAGE 2
==========================================
