There is a version of the intelligence community where the person running it has, at some point, worked in intelligence. Bill Pulte is not that person.
This week the president named Pulte acting Director of National Intelligence. That is the role overseeing the CIA, the NSA, the DIA, and the rest of the country’s spy apparatus. Pulte’s current job is running the Federal Housing Finance Agency. He will keep that job. He will also chair Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. He will now do all of this while running the intelligence community, because apparently the nation’s secrets and the nation’s mortgages can share one calendar.
At a Senate Finance Committee hearing, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was asked whether Pulte holds a security clearance. Bessent said he did not know. Asked whether running the housing agency was already a full-time job on its own, Bessent allowed that it was “a very important position.” Pulte will be doing both simultaneously, plus the mortgage entities.
The hearing produced one other detail. Under oath, Bessent confirmed he had threatened to fight Pulte at a private Georgetown club co-founded by the president’s son, after learning Pulte had been bad-mouthing him to Trump. A senator asked whether Bessent had threatened to punch Pulte in the face. Bessent corrected the record. He had threatened to kick him somewhere lower. “I share the emotion,” the senator said. Per the Washington Examiner, the room took this in stride.
Two grown men in a cabinet, brought to the edge of a brawl at a private club, over who was whispering nicer things about themselves to the boss. One of them will now oversee the country’s intelligence community without a confirmed security clearance.
Pulte earned the appointment by serving as the president’s attack dog at the housing agency, recommending mortgage-fraud investigations into Trump’s political enemies, including a Federal Reserve governor who was subsequently fired over the accusation. There is no public intelligence background. No record of relevant experience. No confirmed clearance.
This is the part the loyalty machine never plans for. You can promote a man for being a good attack dog right up until the morning the attack dog is supposed to be the adult in the room.
When the qualification for running the country’s spy agencies is a willingness to brawl for the boss, what exactly counts as a disqualification?
Sources
Washington Examiner: Bessent says he told Pulte he was going to ‘kick his a**’ last year
Washington Examiner: Inflation, Trump immunity, and Bill Pulte: Takeaways from Scott Bessent’s testimony
