As Bill Pulte gets to work as acting DNI, key Democrats deliver a warning
Senate Republicans started last week with a plan. Just days after Donald Trump announced his plan to nominate Jay Clayton to succeed Tulsi Gabbard as the next director of national intelligence, GOP leaders said the federal prosecutor was so uncontroversial that they hoped to confirm him by the end of the week, which would have been a rare example of remarkable congressional efficiency.
The president, however, didn’t want the Senate to confirm his own DNI nominee. Instead, Trump wanted his other choice — Bill Pulte, the highly controversial director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency — to take the reins as the acting DNI.
He didn’t go into a lot of detail as to why Pulte’s appointment was such a priority, though Trump did recently declare that he expects Pulte to use his new office to perhaps “find out some things about the rigged elections,” reinforcing obvious concerns about the unqualified housing official playing the role of a partisan weapon in pursuit of Trump’s conspiracy theories.
It was against this backdrop that Politico reported late last week that Pulte had already directed staffers “to pull together a list of about 300 candidates to be fired from the National Counterterrorism Center in the coming weeks.” CNN published a related report about Pulte “raising alarm bells among intelligence officials” before his first day even began.
While the reports have not been independently verified by MS NOW, they did generate attention on Capitol Hill. Rep. Jim Jimes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said in a written statement, “If the reports of Bill Pulte’s arrival at ODNI [the Office of the Director of National Intelligence] are true, they demonstrate why he should never spend a minute as Director of National Intelligence, a role he is legally not qualified to perform. I am particularly concerned by reporting that he may undertake a sweeping firing of intelligence professionals, following on major cuts already undertaken last year.”
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Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”
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