Senate confirms Jay Clayton as director of national intelligence

VPM | By Jenna McLaughlin

Published July 29, 2026 at 10:49 AM EDT

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President Trump’s pick for director of national intelligence has cleared the Senate. Jay Clayton was confirmed Tuesday in a 51-47 vote. Democrats fear he might cave in to pressure to politicize intelligence. NPR’s Jenna McLaughlin reports.

JENNA MCLAUGHLIN, BYLINE: Jay Clayton, an attorney, will serve as President Trump’s next director of national intelligence. Clayton faced initial pushback given his lack of intelligence experience. But proponents, including Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who’s the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, cited Clayton’s time as the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York as evidence of his national security expertise ahead of his confirmation vote.

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TOM COTTON: Mr. Clayton went after some of the worst of the worst national security threats. He’s overseen numerous high-profile cases, including the indictment of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro.

MCLAUGHLIN: Democrats say they’re concerned about the pressure Clayton might face to do President Trump’s political bidding. Trump has falsely claimed there’s intelligence casting doubt on the result of the 2020 U.S. presidential election, which he lost. Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia, is the vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee. He asked during Clayton’s confirmation hearing two weeks ago whether he had denied Joe Biden won the 2020 election. Here’s how Clayton answered.

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JAY CLAYTON: Senator, I’m not an election denier. Joe Biden was certified as the president of the United States.

MCLAUGHLIN: However, when pressed to definitively say that Biden had won the election by Senator Jon Ossoff, a Democrat from Georgia, Clayton refused.

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JON OSSOFF: Who won the 2020 election?

CLAYTON: You know, I’m not going to do this with you.

MCLAUGHLIN: On Tuesday evening on the Senate floor, Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, said Clayton had already made clear he would be susceptible to the White House’s influence, given his office’s recent role in issuing subpoenas for records of New York Times journalists and for refusing to say Biden won the 2020 election.

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RON WYDEN: He is never going to stand up to Donald Trump.

MCLAUGHLIN: In addition to facing scrutiny on politics and intelligence analysis, Clayton will lead a workforce during a time when the White House has been pushing for job cuts in intelligence agencies. Even so, the intelligence community might welcome Clayton’s confirmation if it means Congress can move to quickly reauthorize a powerful spy program created in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks. Long criticized by privacy advocates as overly broad, the authority lapsed during debate over Clayton’s nomination.

Jenna McLaughlin, NPR News.

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Jenna McLaughlin

Jenna McLaughlin is NPR's cybersecurity correspondent, focusing on the intersection of national security and technology.

McLaughlin, who joined NPR in September 2021, aims to tell the human stories behind the hackers — taking listeners beyond the technical details and diving into the reasons why technology's vulnerabilities and the people who exploit them matter to both the individual and the world.

Before joining NPR, McLaughlin covered national security, intelligence and technology for a range of publications, including Mother Jones Magazine, The Intercept, Foreign Policy Magazine, CNN and Yahoo News.

For example, in 2016, she uncovered startling details concerning a wave of former U.S. intelligence officials performing offensive cyber and other intelligence activities for the U.A.E. government, several of whom in 2021 brokered a deferred prosecution agreement with the Justice Department. In 2018, McLaughlin was part of a team that exposed how a flaw in a CIA covert communication tool led to the imprisonment and death of CIA human sources in China and Iran.

In addition to serious national security stories, McLaughlin has interviewed high school debate teams on their views about privacy and surveillance in the wake of NSA contractor Edward Snowden's disclosures in 2013, toured the NSA's Hawaii outpost on the North Shore of Oahu beneath the pineapple fields, and sampled a meal made with Blackwater Beef, an attempt made by infamous military contractor Erik Prince to rebrand into the food industry in rural Virginia.

McLaughlin's work has earned her national recognition, including the Gerald R. Ford Award for Reporting on the National Defense in 2019 and a finalist nomination in 2020 for the University of Michigan's Livingston Awards honoring the best journalists under the age of 35.

Her reporting has taken her from Abu Dhabi to Estonia, and she hopes to regularly travel outside Washington in her role at NPR.

McLaughlin in based in Washington and has appeared as an analyst on MSNBC and CBSN, in addition to frequently moderating expert panels. She is a graduate of Johns Hopkins University's Writing Seminars Program, where she was a sea kayaking instructor and Wilderness First Responder.

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