President Donald Trump’s current Director of National Intelligence (DNI), Jay Clayton, is reportedly spending much of his job cleaning up the mess left behind by his predecessor, Tulsi Gabbard.
“As Mr. Clayton took his post from Bill Pulte, who served as the office’s interim director after Ms. Gabbard’s departure, a renovation was underway to replace the office of the official who oversees the president’s daily intelligence briefing with a private dining room. Mr. Clayton stopped the work and ordered the office restored.” reported Julian E. Barnes, Dustin Volz and Robert Draper on Tuesday. “He also ordered a halt to plans to create a firing range at Liberty Crossing, as the office’s Virginia headquarters is known. It is not clear who had approved the firing range. Ms. Gabbard had not approved it and had looked skeptically on the proposal, according to people briefed on her work.”
The journalists added, “Another project — a small museum — was completed before Mr. Clayton arrived, and he has allowed it to remain. Officials are divided over the utility of the museum. While some officials said it was wasteful, given the existing museums at the Defense Intelligence Agency, the C.I.A. and the National Security Agency, several people who have seen the new installation said the displays were well done.”
They concluded, “While the museum passed the review, Mr. Clayton decided the costs of the dining room and the firing range could not be justified and were not central to the office’s mission, according to officials.”
The trio also described how Clayton “effectively dismantled Ms. Gabbard’s Director’s Initiatives Group, the organization that led many of the office’s efforts to declassify and release intelligence.”
Yet Clayton has not abandoned some of Gabbard’s other controversial work, notably their weaponization of the DNI’s office to investigate elections based on Trump’s fixation on the claim he won in 2020. Gabbard faced significant criticism during her tenure for the steps she took to please Trump in this respect.
“The parallel investigations into the 2020 election underscore the extent to which it has returned as a priority for the president,” The Guardian wrote in February. “And Gabbard being sent to the raid showed the interest on voting machine manipulation claims that Trump has cited as evidence the election was stolen. The review led by the office of the director of national intelligence (ODNI), authorized on the basis that it is assessing election integrity, has been focused for months on potential vulnerabilities in voting machines and the possibility of foreign interference.”