Trump Goes for Broke with MAGA Fanatic Bill Pulte to Run U.S. Intelligence
The Federal Housing Finance Agency director is notorious for going out of the way to demean, smear and investigate officials on Trump's enemies list
I’ve often thought of Steve Carell’s hilarious performance as the feckless boss in The Office while observing the ups and downs—mostly downs—of our many directors of National Intelligence. A few years after the ODNI’s first director, John Negroponte, took the job in 2006, I learned he was taking leisurely two hour lunch breaks at The University Club in downtown Washington, where he’d often sign up for a steambath and massage and spend time in the reading room catching up on the day’s newspapers and magazines.
“He’s figured out the job,” I wrote back then. Being DNI was “not worth a bucket of warm spit,” in the immortal words of FDR’s Vice President John Nance Garner. It hardly needed saying that the CIA, which had ruled the intelligence roost since 1947, saw the ODNI, founded to coordinate the work of the sprawling 17-agency intelligence community after their failure to prevent the 9/11 attacks, as a mere annoyance. The FBI, likewise, respectfully declined the ODNI’s request to oversee its counterterrorism work. Over time, many of the agencies were said to be dumping underperforming employees into the ODNI, which grew and grew … and grew, way beyond its original personnel ceiling.
And the job ate up many a DNI.
Poor Dennis Blair, a respected former Navy admiral appointed DNI by President Obama in May 2009, hardly lasted a year. His sin: asserting control over the appointment of CIA station chiefs. He was slapped back and left.
Blair was followed by Gen. James Clapper, who came to the job with solid intelligence management experience in the Pentagon, including as a former chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency. (Notably, Clapper told the Senate in February 2012 that if Iran was attacked over its suspected drive to build nuclear weapons, it could respond by closing the Strait of Hormuz and launching missiles at regional U.S. forces and allies.)
Alas, however, Clapper will forever be remembered not for that, but for his 2013 Senate Intelligence Committee testimony in which he hemmed and hawed and dribbled out a lie about the NSA’s monitoring of U.S. domestic communications.
“Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” Sen. Ron Wyden asked. “No, sir.” Clapper said.
“It does not?” Wyden pressed, knowing the truth. “Not wittingly,” Clapper said. “There are cases where they could inadvertently, perhaps, collect, but not wittingly.”
Bad fumble, but Clapper soon apologized and said he feared exposing a deeply classified secret in open testimony. The infamous NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden said it was Clapper’s lie that moved him to leak NSA surveillance secrets.
But whatever their shortcomings, the ODNI did not deserve its desecration by Donald Trump. It started with his appointment of a succession of bootlicking hacks with little or no intelligence background, starting with Richard Grenell, a Republican operative and Fox News host who Trump had first made an ambassador to Germany, and then John Ratclifffe, a Texas congressman whose first nomination for the job failed over his glaring lack of intelligence experience and rabid attacks on Special Counsel Robert O. Mueller, a former FBI director, for his investigation of the Trump campaign and Russia. On his second try in May 2020, Ratcliffe got the job by a Senate vote of 49–44.
Doing Trump’s Bidding
Four months later, on the eve of Trump’s first presidential debate with Joe Biden, Ratcliffe suddenly announced he possessed and was declassifying damaging Russian intelligence reports about Democrats during the 2016 election—even though he acknowledged they might not be true. Then, only weeks before the 2020 election Ratcliffe participated in an unusual night-time news conference in which he and other officials accused Iran of being responsible for a barrage of emails meant to damage Trump’s candidacy. Russian subversion? Nowhere.
Now he’s CIA director, faithfully carrying out Trump’s retribution mandate with a plan to cut some 1,200 agency employees and stop the “well-documented politicization” of the agency. By way of that, he declassified a CIA memo that “criticized the analytic work that spy agencies did in concluding that Russia influenced the 2016 presidential election because it wanted Donald Trump to win,” CNN reported in February. “Even so, the memo didn’t directly contradict any previous U.S. intelligence.” Meanwhile, both he and Tulsi Gabbard have been virtually invisible on Iran. (Trump memorably said he “didn’t care” what Tulsi Gabbard, who contradicted him publicly on the state of Iran’s nuclear weapons program, said.) As Trump’s principal intelligence adviser for months now, Ratcliffe might have briefed Trump on the pitfalls of attacking Iran, but if he did, the president obviously brushed them aside. Whatever, according to sources who talked with Reuters, “The CIA has stopped contributing to some intelligence assessments” by the ODNI, “including those related to the Iran war…as disputes over intelligence-sharing and areas of responsibility boil over.”
It’s not likely Bill Pulte is going to get involved in dorky issues like that.
Why Pulte?
Trump’s appointment of Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Pulte as acting DNI was greeted with shock and, well, awe—for its raw audacity. Heir to one of the largest American home-building families, Pulte’s only claim to fame, such as it is, comes from instigating baseless mortgage fraud investigations of Trump’s enemies, including New York Attorney General Letitia James and Federal Reserve Board Governor Lisa Cook, and running a social media campaign against outgoing Fed chairman Jerome Powell.
He has zero intelligence experience, at any level. Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins, in a tight reelection bid, questioned “whether he has a security clearance.”
“That lack of experience and Pulte’s penchant for using information from the housing agencies to gin up prosecutions of Trump’s political rivals has alarmed intelligence analysts and federal lawmakers alike, who warn Pulte could weaponize the office against the president’s domestic political rivals and erode trust in U.S. intelligence,” CNBC reported.
Could weaponize? Tulsi Gabbard called former President Obama and several of his national security advisers “traitors” for their investigations of Russian interference inthe 2016 election and referred them to the Justice Department for prosecution. (Grand juries have been convened in Florida.) She bizarrely flew off to Georgia to put herself in the middle of the FBI’s seizure of election ballots.
[And this just in: The Trump administration has hired a convicted a 24-year-old Jan. 6 rioter, Elias Irizarry, to a post in the Defense Department’s Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict office, raising internal alarm about “how anyone convicted in the assault on American democracy could be trusted for such a sensitive role in the U.S. government,” sources told The Washington Post.]
What more could Pulte do?
He’ll get access to every secret Trump wants him to see. And that worries people like Brett Bruen, a former diplomat and National Security Council official under President Obama, who warned that Pulte’s appointment will allow him to root around in “the crown jewels of our most protected secrets,” which would include access to “highly sensitive intelligence collection efforts and information about human intelligence sources and surveillance tools,” CNBC reported.
It pains me to say that it’s not hard to imagine he could dig up something Trump could well offer his pal Vladimir Putin, in exchange for a favor on, say, Ukraine. The same goes for Xi Jinping and, say, Taiwan. In recent weeks especially, Trump has demonstrated there is no bottom to his penchant for corruption.
By statute, Pulte has but 210 days to carry out Trump’s orders, according to the term limit for “acting” officials—unless, of course, Trump tries to break the rule, as he’s done with other acting appointees.
Democrats howled over the news, of course, but so have important Republicans tired of Trump’s betrayals and stunts, such as the Jan. 6 slush fund and tax audit scam.
“We don’t need a weaponized D.N.I.,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune of South Dakota told reporters. “We need professionals there.” Thune added: “If he’s somebody we want in that position permanently, he’s got a lengthy road ahead of him.”
The White House begs to differ.
“The President chooses the best and most talented people to serve in his Cabinet,” White House spokesperson Davis Ingle emailed CNBC. “That is why this Administration has achieved record successes for the American people. Bill Pulte is a great selection and he will do a great job on behalf of the American people.”
All of which brings me back to The Office. There were a lot of recognizable characters in the longrunning TV mockumentary—people we’ve known, liked, respected, and despised, too, through our work years—all kinds. The drama’s main character, Steve Carell’s Michael Scott, is a boss who makes constant misjudgments and bad decisions that hurt people’s feelings and create unnecessary tension in the paper company. In the end, we find him likable, worthy of respect, despite—or even maybe because of—his foibles.
A number of DNI’s have exited that way—even John Negroponte and a handful of other respected professionals who held the impossible job under presidents Bush, Obama, Biden and even Trump, whose first DNI was Dan Coats, the former Indiana Republican senator and U.S. ambassador. In July 2018, Coats released a statement affirming the consensus of U.S. intelligence that the Russians had interfered in the 2016 presidential election. It was the day after Trump famously took Putin’’s word for that over the Coats’ in Helsinki. Coats was gone the next year, replaced by John Ratcliffe.
Trump’s been moving much faster, and boldly, on personnel changes since he took office 18 months ago. Pulte is just the latest in his drive to dominate every organ of U.S. national security. With Russia, China and now Iran on the move, the real damage may be yet to come.