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WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Senate is expected to confirm Jay Clayton on Tuesday to become head of the nation's intelligence agencies, ensuring that a permanent director is in place as the midterm elections approach.
Clayton is expected to be confirmed along party lines after a contentious hearing two weeks ago in which he repeatedly refused to say that former President Joe Biden won the 2020 election. Still, Democrats have said they have more confidence in Clayton than they do in Trump's temporary pick for the job, Bill Pulte, who has no known intelligence experience and investigated the president's perceived enemies in his previous post as a federal housing regulator.
Senators from both parties have expressed concerns about Pulte, who took over on an interim basis last month after Tulsi Gabbard resigned. Pulte was in charge when Trump delivered a speech from the White House earlier this month doubling down on his false claims about the 2020 election, which he lost, and released classified documents that he said were relevant to his arguments.
Hours before the scheduled Senate vote on Clayton, Pulte released on X intelligence community documents from 2020 that described China's capacity to interfere in the American political process as well as vulnerabilities in the election system.
The substance of the material was largely recycled and already known, but its disclosure is part of a broader Trump administration effort to raise concerns about the integrity of U.S. elections and in particular the 2020 race.
Pulte has also presided over a downsizing of the national intelligence office, which functions as a coordinating hub for the U.S. government's intelligence agencies. He boasted on X that with a latest round of job cuts, the office is carrying out about a 30% staff reduction from weeks ago.
Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, said he had worked in the past with Clayton, who is the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York and a former Securities and Exchange Commission chairman. After the hearing, Warner said he would oppose Clayton's nomination but acknowledged that Democrats are "between a rock and a hard place" with Pulte in the job.
The Senate voted 51-43 along party lines on Monday to advance Clayton's nomination.
The Democratic pushback on Clayton comes as Trump has made revisiting 2020 a primary focus, repeatedly trying to cast doubt on that election and amplifying debunked theories about Biden's win.
Clayton told senators that he had no involvement with Trump's primetime speech, but he said repeatedly that the election was "certified" for Biden, declining to say outright that the Democrat won.