President Trump said on Wednesday that he was pulling back his own nominee to be the nation’s top intelligence official as he again tried to pressure Congress to pass a strict voter identification law that does not have enough support among Republicans to advance.
Mr. Trump announced last week that he would nominate Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, to be the director of national intelligence, after senators in both parties condemned his earlier decision to install Bill Pulte, a loyalist and his top housing official, to the post.
Senate leaders had sought to quickly confirm Mr. Clayton, hoping to clear the way for a bipartisan agreement to renew a surveillance law that expired last week. The bill to extend it collapsed amid the furor over Mr. Pulte, who has no national security experience and drew withering criticism from Republicans and Democrats. And some Democrats had indicated they might be willing to fast-track his confirmation, eager to block Mr. Pulte from the post.
But Mr. Trump torched that plan in his social media post early Wednesday morning, just hours before Mr. Clayton was scheduled to have a confirmation hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee. He said he would delay the proceedings, all but guaranteeing that Mr. Pulte would take the job at the end of this week as the acting director of national intelligence.
And Mr. Trump threatened to block the extension of the powerful spying statute, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act or FISA, which expired on Saturday, unless a measure to reauthorize it was attached to elections legislation that would impose national restrictions on voter identification and registration.
Senator John Thune, the South Dakota Republican and majority leader, has said repeatedly that the elections measure does not have sufficient votes to advance and warned this week that appending it to the surveillance legislation would “tank” the FISA bill.
The president cannot cancel a Senate hearing, which is set by the panel holding it, but Mr. Clayton would have to appear for the session to proceed. Representatives for the Intelligence Committee’s Republican chairman, Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, and its top Democrat, Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Mr. Trump’s statement will add to the challenges for Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota and the majority leader, who has faced intense pressure from right-wing lawmakers to push through the president’s long-sought election bill.
Tulsi Gabbard is set to leave her post as the director of national intelligence, a cabinet position that oversees 18 intelligence agencies, on Friday. Senate leaders hoped that quickly approving Mr. Clayton’s nomination to replace her might clear the way for a bipartisan deal to reauthorize Section 702, though privacy advocates in both parties were still seeking substantial changes to it.
That law, which authorizes a warrantless surveillance program that lets the government collect the private communications of foreigners overseas from U.S. providers, lapsed last week, after Democrats who had been working with Republicans on an agreement to renew the law said they would not vote to do so unless Mr. Trump withdrew Mr. Pulte’s nomination.
But because of a quirk in the way the surveillance program is annually renewed by a secretive court, most observers agree it can legally continue to operate until March, though the law’s expiration could prompt legal challenges.
In his post on Wednesday, Mr. Trump claimed that Democrats had violated an agreement to reauthorize the surveillance program after he nominated Mr. Clayton.
He then further complicated the program’s reauthorization by demanding it be attached to his elections bill. Mr. Trump has called that bill, the SAVE America Act, his chief legislative priority and views it as critical to Republicans’ chances of winning the midterm elections.
“To add a slight bit of intrigue but, for the Good of the Nation, and the People of our Country, I will not approve FISA without THE SAVE AMERICA ACT going along with it,” Mr. Trump said in his social media post.
Democrats remain strongly opposed to the bill, and Mr. Thune has repeatedly said that there is not sufficient support among G.O.P. senators to undermine the filibuster to pass it.
“We are bound by arithmetic in the United States Senate,” he said in a Fox News interview on Tuesday. “The votes currently aren’t there.”
Mr. Trump also said that he would not remove Mr. Clayton from his role as U.S. attorney before his nominee to replace him, James M. McDonald, one of the president’s personal lawyers, was approved by Congress.
Under a longstanding Senate practice known as the “blue slip,” home-state senators can block some federal prosecutorial nominees. For Mr. McDonald to advance, the two Democratic senators from New York — Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, and Kirsten Gillibrand — would need to sign off on his nomination.
Mr. Trump, who has long been frustrated that Senate traditions have stymied his agenda, attacked the blue slip in his social media post and urged Republicans to abandon it.
