Trump DNI pick is about loyalty and control, not national security

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Donald Trump Bill Pulte Director of National Intelligence DNI

Trump DNI pick is about loyalty and control, not national security

The Director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency and chairman of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Bill Pulte, has been picked by Donald Trump to become interim Director of National Intelligence (DNI) to replace Tulsi Gabbard, who is stepping down — a move motivated by political loyalty and Trump’s burning desire to seize dictatorial control over the intelligence community, not national security.

Trump is selling Pulte as the right choice due to his “deep experience managing the most sensitive matters in America, the safety and soundness of the Markets.” The simple truth is that Pulte has absolutely ZERO, ZILCH, NADA experience for the position responsible for the oversight of 18 agencies, including the CIA and NSA, and serves as the principal intelligence adviser to the president and manager of daily intelligence briefings (via TIME.com):

Pulte comes into the role with effectively no direct experience in intelligence. He currently serves as the Director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), which oversees the U.S. housing finance system. But Pulte has close ties to Trump and has been a reliable ally to the President, having publicly attacked and helped initiate probes into several of his political enemies.

Pulte has been in his role as the head of the FHFA since last March. He previously founded his own investment firm and served on the board of PulteGroup, the home-construction company founded by his grandfather. Prior to him joining the Administration last year, he and his wife had reportedly donated around $1 million to Trump’s political activities.

During his time as FHFA director, Pulte has made multiple criminal referrals to the Department of Justice (DOJ) over allegations of mortgage fraud against Trump’s [political] adversaries. (Emphasis mine)

In addition to rewarding Pulte’s loyalty to the Magnanimous One, this appointment puts the loyalist in a position to influence Trump’s dictatorial ambitions ahead of the midterm elections. Trump has called for “nationalizing” the elections, and some of his sycophantic followers have urged him to declare a national emergency and seize control of the election. Trump has already involved the Intelligence Department in election matters when he had Tulsi Gabbard team up with the FBI to seize voting records in Georgia.

Reaction to the obviously unqualified appointee has been a bipartisan affair as both sides of the political aisle provided accurate interpretations as to Trump’s true motivation — loyalty and control, not national security (via CommonDreams.org):

Republican US senators including Majority Leader John Thune on Tuesday joined a growing chorus of criticism in response to President Donald Trump’s appointment of loyalist Bill Pulte as acting director of national intelligence, despite an utter lack of relevant experience or expertise. “We don’t need a weaponized DNI; we need professionals there,” Thune said, according to The Hill.

Democrats [also] piled on Pulte later on Tuesday. Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan said on X: “As someone who helped set up the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, I oppose elevating Bill Pulte to acting director. He has no experience. Zero. And he is the wrong choice to help keep us safe.”

“Mr. Pulte has weaponized his current agency against the president’s critics, he’s fired federal watchdogs looking into his allies, and he is under active investigation by the Government Accountability Office,” she continued. “This all makes him an incredibly dangerous choice to be in charge of ODNI and have access to the tools of this office.”

Advocacy groups also rejected Pulte’s appointment, with the co-chairs of the Not Above the Law coalition issuing a statement reading, “This appointment is a reward, and has nothing to do with qualifications.”

“At FHFA, Bill Pulte did one thing: hunt Trump’s perceived enemies,” the statement by Public Citizen’s Lisa Gilbert, Constitutional Accountability Center’s Praveen Fernandes, MoveOn’s Kelsey Herbert, and Stand Up America’s Brett Edkins continued. “He ginned up mortgage fraud allegations against sitting officials, which federal investigators found baseless, and weaponized a housing regulator to punish those who tried to hold Trump accountable.”

“If past is prologue, he will now do the same with the vast resources of the US intelligence community,” the co-chairs asserted. “The agencies built to protect Americans, including our troops at home and abroad, will be turned into instruments of political retribution, betraying the men and women who serve those agencies and every American whose safety depends on them.”

“Trump doesn’t staff his government with people who uphold the law,” the statement adds. “He installs people willing to break it for him, and now he’s handing one of them the keys to our nation’s most sensitive information.” (Emphasis mine)

The office of Director of National Intelligence is a post 9/11 creation under the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act (IRTPA) of 2004 and was just one of the many liberty-killing actions taken by Washington, including:

Created to ensure a “safe” America, these and many other programs were birthed under George W. Bush — proving that “compassionate conservative” was really code for “big government tyrant” — and they were expanded under Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden to create a defacto police state.

One area where Pulte’s appointment might come in handy for Donald Trump (and the Republican Party) is with the upcoming vote on a program loved by Republicans even though they pretend to oppose it: another extension of FISA 702, the program that allows warrantless government spying on Americans.

Throughout his first term in office and beginning with his second, Trump and the Republican Party made it perfectly clear that government power over all things was paramount to protecting and defending liberty, which is why they’ve been hard at work ensuring that FISA and government spying lives forever.

Just a few months ago, Sen. Tom Cotton led a quiet push for an 18-month “clean reauthorization” of FISA 702 in the hope that Republicans could kick the can down the road until after the 2026 midterms — assuming we have them — when they can work on ways to make it permanent if they retain control of Washington.

Donald Trump also called for an 18-month (just like Cotton) “clean extension” due to security concerns in the early days of his unconstitutional war against Iran — an idea supported by other Republicans in Congress (via TheHill.com):

President Trump made his first public call for a clean extension of the nation’s warrantless spy powers, pointing to the ongoing conflict in Iran as a rationale.

Trump, through legislative channels, has called for an 18-month extension of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

In shifting positions, Trump has gotten some notable [Republican] lawmakers to move with him. (Emphasis mine)

A “clean extension” of FISA 702 like the one being pushed by Cotton and Trump would be the ultimate display of government arrogance and a complete disregard of liberty (via The Record):

“A clean refresh of FISA Section 702 would show utter disrespect for the American people,” according to Jeramie D. Scott, senior counsel and director of the Project on Surveillance Oversight at the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

“We don’t need a reform commission to tell us that Section 702 authority, a foreign intelligence authority, has been abused to access Americans’ communications,” he said in a statement. “It’s well documented and so is one of the most straightforward solutions—a warrant requirement to search Americans’ communications incidentally collected through Section 702 surveillance.” (Emphasis mine)

In retrospect, the rationale used to justify the government’s liberty-killing response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks has led us to where we are today. Some may call that an unintended consequence.

But then again, maybe it wasn’t unintended after all. Maybe, all someone like Trump needed to accomplish the ultimate destruction of liberty was the opportunity to appoint someone like Bill Pulte to the DNI position; someone whose only qualifications for the job was his loyalty Trump and his tyrannical ambition to seize control over everything.

 

David Leach is the owner of the Strident Conservative. He holds people of every political stripe accountable for their failure to uphold conservative values, and he promotes those values instead of political parties. He is the author of The New Axis of Evil: Exposing the Bipartisan War on Liberty.

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