U.S. Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA), a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, asked President Trump’s DNI nominee Jay Clayton at his confirmation hearing this week, “Who won the 2020 election?”
The former chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission during the first Trump administration replied: “I’m not going to do this with you.”
[NOTE: All of Trump’s nominees who have been asked the same direct question at such congressional hearings, have repeatedly refused to say that President Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election, instead allowing only that Biden “was certified” and served four years in office. Critics say the deflections are meant to support Trump’s claims that the election was “rigged.”]
Ossoff responded to Clayton, who would replace the departed Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence: “This is a job interview. You have an obligation to be honest with the committee.”
Sen. @Ossoff: Who won the 2020 election?
DNI nominee Jay Clayton: I’m not going to do this with you
Ossoff: This is a job interview. You have an obligation to be honest with the committee.
Clayton: I’m not gonna get into that with you
Ossoff: You refuse to answer a basic… pic.twitter.com/8J06kH5ST2
— Headquarters (@HQNewsNow) July 15, 2026
Ossoff, who is running for reelection, added, “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?”
Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) afterwards accused Ossoff and Democrats of “playing a game” by asking the question of Trump nominees.
When asked on CNN by host Kasie Hunt why Clayton didn’t want to answer the question, Kennedy said, “Well, I don’t know. But there’s this little game, if you follow all of the committees, it happens every time we have a nominee, where the Democrats try to get a nominee by the President to say that the President actually won the election and President Biden didn’t. And they want the nominee to use the magic words that Trump lost the election and the nominees are understandably, in my opinion, don’t want to play that game.”
When Hunt asked, “How is it game? It’s just what happened,” Kennedy replied, “No, it is a game…It’s a game of words by my Democratic colleagues.”
Kennedy added, “I don’t think there is any doubt about the fact that Joe Biden was the president, and I haven’t heard a single nominee by President Trump say ‘Donald Trump won the election, Joe Biden didn’t.’”
Kennedy: There’s this little game where the Democrats want the nominee to use the magic words that Trump lost the election and the nominees are understandably, in my opinion, don’t want to play that game.
Hunt: How is it game? It’s just what happened.
Kennedy: No, it is a… pic.twitter.com/kfawTQqt2a
— Acyn (@Acyn) July 15, 2026