President Donald Trump‘s order to halt the nomination process for director of national intelligence sent Republican lawmakers scrambling on Wednesday, according to CNN.
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) announced just an hour before Jay Clayton, Trump’s pick for the job, was set to testify before the Senate confirmation hearing that it was being postponed after the president told Clayton not to show up, CNN anchor Brianna Keilar reported.
“The president is accusing lawmakers of moving too fast to confirm Clayton, and he’s vowing to hold up a critical spying measure, FISA reauthorization, unless a separate voter ID measure, separate and unrelated, by the way, is attached to it,” Keilar explained.
CNN congressional correspondent Lauren Fox described the whiplash among the GOP leaders.
“A lot of frustration from some Senate Republicans up here on Capitol Hill, in part because they really believe that they were on a fast track to approving Jay Clayton to be the next DNI at a moment where many Republicans, as well as Democrats, were worried about Bill Pulte, who Trump had selected to be his acting DNI, stepping into that role,” Fox said.
“So right now, Republicans are a little bit flummoxed because they believe that they had been working in good faith with Democrats,” Fox said.
“They had been getting signals that Democrats were willing to try to move this nomination as expeditiously as possible,” Fox said. “And then you just had Donald Trump, as one member put it, throwing a grenade into this entire process by saying on Truth Social in the wee hours of the morning, while many senators were sleeping, that he did not believe that Jay Clayton’s nomination should go forward today before the Senate Intelligence Committee a couple hours later, you had Senator Tom Cotton, who is the top Republican on that committee, making clear that he wanted to continue having this hearing unless he got word that Donald Trump didn’t want Clayton coming before the committee later today. Well, clearly he got that word because a couple hours later, Cotton made clear that he was disappointed, but that they were going to be postponing this confirmation hearing.”
Trump was pushing the demands forward for a key reason, Fox explained.
“Those two things are unrelated, and I would just point out that there isn’t support, even among Republicans in the Senate, for that voter ID law on its own,” Fox added. “It would need 60 votes in the Senate. It doesn’t even have enough Republican support to get a majority of the vote. So a lot of Republicans are just shaking their head right now, feeling like they were on a fast track to getting Jay Clayton to serve as DNI, someone who’s popular, someone who a lot of Republicans have worked with in the past. Now they are basically starting back at zero.”
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