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If a man can’t truthfully answer who won a presidential election, why should any American trust him to tell the truth about foreign adversaries, intelligence assessments, or threats to our national security?
The question Jon Ossoff asked director of national intelligence nominee Jay Clayton wasn’t difficult.
It required no legal analysis. No interpretation. No nuance.
It required only the willingness to tell the truth.
“Who won the 2020 presidential election?”
Every American knows the answer.
Joe Biden.
Yet Jay Clayton—seeking one of the most sensitive positions in the United States government—couldn’t bring himself to say the words plainly. Instead, he hid behind procedural language, spoke about certifications, and accused Ossoff of political theater rather than answer a factual question that’s been settled for nearly six years.
Ossoff responded to Clayton’s responses in this way:
You refuse to answer a basic question about who won a presidential election. But you ask to lead America’s intelligence community. Isn’t it humiliating to be unable to answer this question? To have to indulge the president’s delusions? We know, you know, everybody in this room knows the truthful answer to the question. Why can you not give it?
The exchange revealed something far more important than Jay Clayton’s opinion of the 2020 election: it revealed his character. Or more accurately, the absence of it.
I’ve been on the losing side of a presidential election. I helped place John McCain’s concession call to Barack Obama.
Not once—not for a single second—did anyone in our campaign suggest that John McCain’s disappointment justified an assault on the Constitution. No one proposed inventing fraud claims to soothe his pride. No one imagined that protecting a candidate’s ego was more important than protecting the Republic.
The idea would have been considered insane. Because serious people understood something that has become almost revolutionary in today’s Republican Party: candidates don’t own elections.
The American people do.
The concession call isn’t an act of generosity. It isn’t an expression of friendship. It’s not an acknowledgment that the winner is admirable or deserving.
It’s an acknowledgment that the people have spoken.
It’s an affirmation that the Constitution governs the transfer of power—not the emotions of the defeated.
Donald Trump rejected that principle.
What has followed has been one of the most shameful spectacles in American political history: accomplished men and women humiliating themselves by pretending not to know what they know.
Jay Clayton joined that procession.
Jon Ossoff did exactly what a United States senator is supposed to do. He tested whether a nominee entrusted with America’s secrets possessed the independence to distinguish fact from political obedience.
Jay Clayton failed—not because he didn’t know who won the election—but because he lacked the courage to say it.
That’s the defining moral disease of Trump’s Republican Party.
Its leaders don’t ask public officials to be competent. They ask them to be compliant.
They don’t reward independence. They reward submission.
They don’t demand fidelity to the Constitution. They demand fidelity to Donald Trump.
That’s why the question mattered.
If a man can’t truthfully answer who won the last presidential election, why should any American trust him to tell the truth about foreign adversaries, intelligence assessments, or threats to our national security?
The issue was never 2020.
The issue is whether truth itself remains disqualifying inside today’s Republican Party.
Jay Clayton answered that question.
He answered it without ever speaking the words he was too afraid to say.
Steve Schmidt
Steve Schmidt is a political analyst for MSNBC and NBC News. He served as a political strategist for George W. Bush and the John McCain presidential campaign. Schmidt is a founder of The Lincoln Project, a group founded to campaign against former President Trump. It became the most financially successful Super-PAC in American history, raising almost $100 million to campaign against Trump's failed 2020 re-election bid. He left the group in 2021.
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