Jay Clayton

Walter J. "Jay" Clayton III is an American lawyer who was a partner of Sullivan & Cromwell, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission from 2017 to 2020, non-executive chairman of Apollo Global Management in succession to its founder Leon Black, and from 2025 United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York. In November 2025 Attorney General Pam Bondi assigned him to investigate Jeffrey Epstein's dealings with Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, Reid Hoffman and JPMorgan Chase; Hoffman and Deutsche Bank had been among the clients Clayton disclosed on his 2017 government ethics filing. He was sworn in as the ninth Director of National Intelligence on August 3, 2026.¹²³⁴

Sullivan & Cromwell

Clayton was born at Fort Eustis in Newport News, Virginia, and grew up mostly in central and southeastern Pennsylvania. He holds an engineering degree from the University of Pennsylvania, degrees in economics from the University of Cambridge, where he was a Thouron Scholar, and a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania Law School. After clerking for Judge Marvin Katz of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, he joined Sullivan & Cromwell, became a partner, sat on its management committee and co-headed its corporate practice; from 2009 to 2017 he also taught at Penn Law.¹

On his nomination to the SEC, Clayton filed a financial disclosure with the Office of Government Ethics listing clients from which he had earned more than 5,000 dollars in a year. They included Deutsche Bank AG, The Goldman Sachs Group and the Goldman Sachs Philanthropy Fund, Barclays, UBS Securities, Brown Brothers Harriman, Bessemer Trust, SoftBank, the Royal Bank of Canada, Pershing Square, Paul Tudor Jones, Valeant Pharmaceuticals, Volkswagen, TeliaSonera, Suning Commerce Group, The Weinstein Company and Reid Hoffman. Four individual and five corporate clients were withheld "because the disclosure of the representations are the subject of attorney-client privilege and other confidentiality obligations," two of them because they were "the subject of a pending non-public investigation." He reported 7.6 million dollars in income from the firm in the preceding year.²⁵

SEC and Apollo

Nominated by President Donald Trump on January 20, 2017, Clayton was sworn in as SEC chairman on May 4, 2017 and served until December 2020, sitting also on the President's Working Group on Financial Markets, the Financial Stability Oversight Council and the Financial Stability Board.¹ On the night of June 19, 2020, while still at the SEC, he was named by Attorney General William Barr as Trump's choice to replace Geoffrey Berman as U.S. Attorney in Manhattan; Berman refused to step down, saying, "I have not resigned, and have no intention of resigning, my position, to which I was appointed by the Judges of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York," and was removed the next day.⁶

Apollo appointed Clayton its lead independent director from March 1, 2021. On March 22, 2021 it announced that he had been named non-executive chairman and that he and Marc Rowan, as chief executive, succeeded Black, who stepped down citing "my wife Debra's and my health issues." Clayton said, "It is an honor to serve Apollo's investors as Chairman and further the founders' commitment to leading, shareholder-oriented governance."⁷

U.S. Attorney in Manhattan

Clayton was sworn in as interim U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York in April 2025, on appointment by the Attorney General.⁸ On August 18, 2025, as his interim term was about to expire, the judges of the district appointed "Walter J. Clayton III" United States Attorney under 28 U.S.C. § 546(d), effective August 20, "to serve until a United States Attorney, nominated by the President and appointed with the advice and consent of the United States Senate, takes office."⁹

On July 16, 2025 the office dismissed Maurene Comey, a prosecutor on the Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell cases, by an email citing "Article II of the United States Constitution." According to her lawsuit against the department, when she asked Clayton for an explanation he told her: "All I can say is it came from Washington. I can't tell you anything else."¹⁰

On November 14, 2025, at Trump's public request, Bondi assigned Clayton to investigate Epstein's dealings with Clinton, Summers, Hoffman and JPMorgan Chase. Five days later Trump signed the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which permits the withholding of records that would jeopardize "an active federal investigation."³ Letters on the department's review of files under the Act were filed over Clayton's name in United States v. Maxwell on January 15 and January 31, 2026 (ECF Nos. 839 and 847).¹¹

Director of National Intelligence

Trump nominated Clayton for Director of National Intelligence to fill the post vacated in June 2026 by Tulsi Gabbard.⁴ At his confirmation hearing before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on July 15, 2026, he said, "Senator, I'm not an election denier. Joe Biden was certified as the president of the United States," but declined when pressed by Senator Jon Ossoff to say that Joe Biden had won the 2020 election. The committee chairman, Tom Cotton, cited his office's cases, "including the indictment of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro." Senator Ron Wyden cited the office's "recent role in issuing subpoenas for records of New York Times journalists." The Senate confirmed him 51 to 47 on July 28, 2026.⁴¹² He was sworn in on August 3, 2026 to oversee the eighteen agencies of the intelligence community, saying the community's work must be "never weaponized for political motives."⁴

He was succeeded in Manhattan by Jamie McDonald, who had served as director of enforcement at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission from 2017 to 2020 and then as a partner of Sullivan & Cromwell.¹³