What happened
President Donald Trump on Wednesday scuppered plans by Senate Republicans to quickly confirm his nominee for director of national intelligence, Jay Clayton. Posting on social media from the G7 summit in France, Trump said he was canceling Clayton’s confirmation hearing, hours before it was set to begin, until the Senate confirmed his former lawyer James McDonald as U.S. attorney in Manhattan. “To add a slight bit of intrigue,” Trump said, he won’t sign a reauthorization of FISA’s lapsed Section 702 spying tool until the Senate approves voter-eligibility legislation that lacks the votes to pass.
Who said what
Trump’s “extraordinary” dictates make it “more likely that his temporary pick for the intelligence job,” housing official Bill Pulte, takes over Friday, The Associated Press said. Democrats balked at reauthorizing Section 702 if Pulte became acting DNI, and senators had been “rushing to get Clayton confirmed by the end of the week, to get ahead of Pulte’s scheduled start,” The Wall Street Journal said. Pulte is an unqualified “sycophant,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said, and Trump is “undermining our ability to produce the results that he wants.”
What next?
Trump is “presumably happy for the highly partisan Pulte to have access to powerful spying tools for 210 days,” The Washington Post editorial board said in an op-ed, as Senate Republicans decide “how much humiliation they are willing to tolerate.”
Trump canceled the nominee’s hearing hours before it was set to start
