(CNN) — Jay Clayton, President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the US intelligence community who was confirmed in a 51-47 vote on Tuesday night, steps into his new job inheriting a diminished office whose authority and relevance are at a historic low point.
The new director of national intelligence succeeds Bill Pulte, a combative and controversial housing executive with no national security experience whom Trump installed as acting director for a 40-day tenure.
The worst fears of Pulte’s critics — that he would use his access to classified intelligence to persecute the president’s political enemies, fears that several senators described as encouraging a swift confirmation of Clayton — did not come to pass. Pulte did accelerate sharp staffing cuts that Trump had ordered and critics argued would hamstring the intelligence community, but there is broad bipartisan agreement that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence had become too large, too bloated. Some Republican Senate Intelligence staffers, who had been concerned initially over Pulte’s appointment and lack of experience, later said they were pleased with the work Pulte had done to cut some of that bloat.
Clayton, whose legal career centered on corporate law before serving as a US attorney under Trump, must now chart a course for an organization that struggled with its mandate even before Donald Trump and his allies made it their top “Deep State” target.
What seems most likely, current and former officials say, is that Clayton is going to oversee its obsolescence.
“They haven’t really rethought the things it does, they’ve just fired people,” said Mike Casey, the former director of the counterintelligence office at the ODNI and a former Democratic staff director on the Senate Intelligence Committee. The ODNI, he said, is “sinking slowly beneath the waves.”
The ODNI did not immediately respond to a request for comment about changes to the office during the second Trump administration. The CIA declined to comment.
Clayton has limited formal experience in intelligence, although he has dealt with some related issues beginning early during Trump’s second term as the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York , which prosecutes a large number of terrorism cases. And the role of the president’s top intelligence advisor is already effectively filled by CIA Director John Ratcliffe.
Ratcliffe — who recommended Clayton for the job and helped shape Pulte’s time in office by pushing back on some potentially more extreme actions, according to some sources — appears likely to retain his position as the administration’s leading voice on intelligence matters.
In a debate over the release of classified documents related to foreign interference in the 2020 election last week, Pulte and Ratcliffe got into a heated dispute over the scope of redactions in the documents the White House planned to release, according to four sources familiar with the exchange. Pulte argued to make more of the text public, according to those sources. Both parties raised their voices, the sources said.
But ultimately, Pulte backed down and demonstrably began to defer to Ratcliffe, the sources said.
It was an episode that highlighted the authority of the CIA director — and the relative lack of power of the DNI.
“I’m not 100 percent clear why [Clayton] took the job, candidly,” Casey said. “You’re US Attorney for SDNY. ODNI probably smaller than SDNY now, with less actual work and is less relied on right now.”
Asked about the episode, White House Spokesman Davis Ingle said in a statement, “Bill Pulte is a patriot who a great job carrying out the President’s agenda as acting Director of National Intelligence. Efforts by the legacy media to sow internal division are a distraction that will not work. As the permanent Director of National Intelligence, Jay Clayton will deliver timely, independent, and reliable intelligence that our Nation depends on to keep Americans safe.”
‘Unsexy, important things’
The intelligence community has been a longstanding source of grievance for the president, who believes that he was undermined during his first term by a “deep state” of officials who were behind the “Russia hoax” — the investigation into his 2016 campaign’s ties to Russia — and he entered office vowing to bring it to heel.
A White House source said that Trump was very happy with the job Pulte did cutting positions, but whether the president considers the job finished remains to be seen. Top Republicans, including Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Tom Cotton of Arkansas, have made no secret of the fact that they want to see the ODNI even further reduced.
Clayton demurred during his confirmation hearing on the question of cuts, offering no detailed vision for the future of the agency.
“It will have a very challenging rebuild (post Trump),” said one US official familiar with the changes. “Or it will be eliminated in its current form.”
It does some very “unsexy, important things,” Casey said. It sets security standards for classified rooms, for example, so personnel from different agencies can work in the same facilities. It has unique authorities to fuse domestic and foreign intelligence to identify threats.
But in practice, its relevance and authority — in particular relative to the CIA, whose director used to act as the leader of the whole community — has ebbed and flowed depending on the administration.
Clayton is a Trump administration survivor; the DNI post will be his third job across two administrations.
And he does have some bipartisan clout on Capitol Hill. A number of Democrats initially welcomed Trump’s selection of Clayton in June, citing his experience as the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York and a former chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission. But many soured on his nomination after his confirmation hearing two weeks ago, when he sidestepped questioning from Democrats on whether Joe Biden “won” the 2020 presidential election. He would only testify that Biden was “certified” as the president, deepening fears among Democrats that he would politicize intelligence to satisfy the beliefs of the president.
Still, some Democrats expressed relief this week that Clayton would soon replace Pulte. “We’ve got to get a new DNI in,” Warner told reporters Monday. Warner said he would not support Clayton’s confirmation but called him a “vast improvement.”
Cuts
Clayton steps into an office that still could play a significant role in shaping US intelligence. “Clayton is inheriting an organization that still has some capacity to do things, if he chooses to actually utilize the people that work for him,” the US official said.
But current and former officials alike say it has been deeply degraded — and Clayton was vague about his plans during his confirmation hearing.
The National Intelligence Council, the top office that is responsible for presenting the consensus judgment of the intelligence community for policymakers, is “severely understaffed,” the US official said. The ODNI is traditionally staffed by intelligence officers on loan from other agencies and the turmoil has meant that it has become more difficult to recruit even for posts that the current administration might wish to keep. It has gone from being a desired posting to a place to be avoided.
Moral is “horrible,” the US official said. “People are shell shocked and living in fear of the next round of cuts.”
Exactly how deep the cuts run is difficult to gauge. Pulte announced on Tuesday a fifth and “near final” round of firings, claiming in a post on X that the dismissals had cumulatively axed “approximately 30%” of staff at the top spy agency; his predecessor Tulsi Gabbard had previously announced that she planned to cut the workforce, then around 2,000 people, by 40%.
CNN was not able to independently confirm those figures and Rachel Cohen, a spokeswoman for the Democratic Vice Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner of Virginia, said Pulte has “so far declined to provide the Senate Intelligence Committee with the information necessary to assess the accuracy of those statements or the basis for those decisions.”
Even those who support the agency broadly caution against too much hysteria about the depth of the cuts. Some parts of the agency had undeniably grown too big, Casey noted. And many of the people Pulte touted as “firing” were simply returned to their home agencies and remained employed by the federal government, current and former officials said. For some critics, the far deeper concern with Pulte beyond his inexperience was whether he would weaponize the sensitive intelligence he now had access to against the president’s critics. As Director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, he helped facilitate mortgage fraud investigations against the president’s top political opponents.
The president also tasked Pulte with declassifying information and had appointed the housing official with the hope that Pulte would work to declassify certain materials of interest to him, like those related to the 2020 election and his false claims of widespread election fraud.
But in reality, US officials familiar with Pulte’s tenure said, he only had the time — and ability — to execute the firings. The declassification project largely fell to the conservative commentator John Solomon, who had become a special government employee earlier this summer.
“The Intelligence Community must protect the American people, NOT the political whims of the bloated and corrupt elite class,” Pulte said in a post on X on Tuesday.
Gabbard and Pulte both “seemed to view the overall agency they oversaw in an adversarial way,” the US official said. “Never trusting the larger organization and staff. Only relying on a very small group of people they trusted.”
Many of the people trusted by his predecessors are gone, leaving Clayton to decide what he wants the purpose of ODNI to be.
The story headline has been updated.
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