Dem
47
GOP
53
Donald Trump has just made his latest move in the game of DNI chess checkers tiddlywinks he's been
playing with the Senate.
Recall that Trump wants Bill Pulte, an utterly unqualified flunky, to serve as acting DNI. There is nobody, regardless of political stripe, who does not believe the goal here is to give Pulte an opportunity to find some intel that can be weaponized against the President's enemies, foreign and/or domestic. Perhaps that means laying hands on information that one federal agency or another already has in its possession and turning it over to Trump. More likely it means using the nation's intelligence-gathering apparatus to "investigate" people like James Comey, Hillary Clinton, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) and Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) in search of dirt.
Pulte is legally entitled to serve as acting DNI for up to 120 days, since he is already Senate-confirmed to his current position. And the day he would take over, on an acting basis, is... today. In an effort to forestall this, members of Congress from both parties demanded that: (1) Pulte not be allowed to serve, and (2) Trump should nominate immediately a proper replacement. The President only delivered on one of those two demands, naming U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Jay Clayton. And even then, Trump only made the pick after the House had adjourned for a week's break. So, the House declined to renew the intelligence-gathering law known as FISA, hoping that would put pressure on Trump to abandon his Pulte plan.
That did not work, so Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) came up with a new plan: He and his colleagues, including the Democrats, would rush the approval of Clayton, so that there would be no "interim" period during which Pulte might serve. This plan might well have worked; Clayton isn't really qualified to be DNI, as he has no intelligence experience. But he's much more qualified than Pulte, while also being less corrupt. So, the members of the Senate might well have swallowed hard and agreed to universal consent (necessary for the expedited timeline), just to block Pulte.
And that now brings us to Trump's counter-move. Shortly before Clayton's confirmation hearing was set to begin, the President announced that he was "postponing" the nomination (while Clayton said he'd been told by the White House not to show up). Trump made two demands of his own, which are ostensibly related to each other. The first of those is that he will not un-postpone the nomination until his nominee to be the new U.S. Attorney for SDNY, Jamie McDonald, is confirmed.
If that was the only issue, then Thune might be able to swing it, though a lot of members would have to grit their teeth at the thought of ramming through two key nominees (i.e., McDonald and Clayton) because Trump can't play nice. However, the second demand that Trump made was that he would not sign off on an extension of FISA until Congress passes the SAVE Act.
This means that we are now in the curious situation that Congress is using FISA as leverage against Trump, and Trump is using FISA as leverage against Congress. It's not supposed to work that way. In any case, as we have written many times, passing the SAVE Act is not plausible. Senate Democrats would never go for it, and so it would quickly die on the altar of the filibuster. If Thune agreed to kill the filibuster, or to create another carve-out, that almost certainly still would not get the job done. It is improbable that there are 50 GOP votes to change the filibuster or 50 GOP votes to pass the Save Act, much less 50 votes for both things. It was a major theme of Sen. Thom Tillis' (R-NC) letter, which we wrote about earlier this week, that the Save Act is a no fly zone for Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) and for senators from predominantly rural states.
We spent 4+ years during Trump v1.0 trying to make sense of what he does. Somehow, during Trump v2.0, he's become even more inscrutable. Here are our best guesses as to what is going on here, from most to least likely:
Again, it's not clear if we have two pairings here (with McDonald and Clayton being #1, and SAVE Act and FISA being #2), or if these are all connected for Trump, since they're all linked to national security. If he won't send Clayton to the hill until McDonald is confirmed AND the SAVE Act is passed, then Pulte is going to have a nice, long time to conduct sham investigations. And even if FISA and the SAVE Act are a separate thing for him, unrelated to the DNI position, then he's either going to have to back down, or the U.S. is going to be operating in partial darkness for a while, intelligence-wise. Everyone will know who is responsible, and if there happens to be a terrorist attack during that period, then Katy bar the door. (Z)