Jay Clayton sat before the Senate Intelligence Committee this week and declined to confirm that Joe Biden won the 2020 election. Clayton, Trump's pick to run national intelligence, apparently believes the word "intelligence" applies only to classified briefings and not basic arithmetic.
The same Senate that's supposed to oversee spy agencies and nuclear codes now has to ask a nominee whether he accepts that the guy currently sitting in the Oval Office actually won his election. This is the confirmation hearing equivalent of asking a pilot if he believes in gravity. Except the pilot keeps saying he hasn't reviewed all the data on gravity and would prefer not to comment.
Clayton previously ran the SEC, where his main job was pretending to regulate markets while everyone front-ran everything. Now he wants to run an agency with "intelligence" in the name while demonstrating he lacks the basic cognitive function required to acknowledge observable reality. Perfect fit.
The senators asking these questions looked confused, which makes sense. They thought they were vetting someone to analyze threats from China and Russia. Instead they're hosting a guy who won't confirm that water is wet because it might upset the guy who nominated him.
Retail traders watched this hearing and immediately started longing volatility, convinced that a man who can't admit Biden won will somehow predict the next geopolitical crisis. They'll lose money on that trade too, because they always do, but at least this time they can blame it on a director of national intelligence who doesn't believe in publicly available election results.
Clayton will probably get confirmed anyway because nothing matters and the simulation is broken.
Photo by History in HD on Unsplash
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