Days before he was nominated as director of national intelligence, Jay Clayton discussed the potential of fraud in California’s elections, falsely saying the state’s laws left open the “opportunity for fraud”.
Clayton, the US attorney for Manhattan and the former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, has a lengthy legal résumé in the private and public sector and a track record of unequivocal support for Donald Trump and his agenda.
Like Bill Pulte, Clayton does not have experience in the intelligence world and is most recently notable for signing off on the indictment against the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro.
Before Trump appointed him to the SEC role, Clayton had a career as a Wall Street attorney that made him a multimillionaire. While a lawyer at the white-shoe law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, he represented major financial players including Goldman Sachs, which he represented during the 2008 recession, according to the New York Times.
In 2017, during Trump’s first term, the president nominated Clayton as chair of the SEC. Near the end of that term, Clayton was tapped for the US attorney in Manhattan role, though he was not confirmed by the Senate at the time, and instead approved by the court itself. At the time, the Wall Street Journal noted the move put Clayton, who had largely avoided partisan political drama, in the middle of “partisan warfare”.
More recently, the New York Times reported that Clayton has been socializing and golfing with Trump, and that Clayton has “often been absent” from his office..
Clayton could continue Tulsi Gabbard’s record of investigating election fraud at Trump’s behest. On CNBC on 8 June, during a conversation about allegations of fraud in the California elections, Clayton said of election integrity: “We’re doing an absolutely terrible job, and the American people are right to question it.” Trump has called the elections “rigged”, while presenting no evidence to support the allegations.
He said California’s mail-voting laws, which include sending mail ballots to all voters and a grace period for ballots to arrive after election day, created an “opportunity for fraud”.
Clayton holds an undergraduate engineering degree from the University of Pennsylvania and a master’s degree from King’s College, Cambridge. He returned to Penn to earn a law degree in 1993.
