🔥EPISODE 18: The Attack Dog Gets a Bigger Yard

On Tuesday, Donald Trump named Bill Pulte as acting Director of National Intelligence.

Bill Pulte's official FHFA biography lists his experience in housing and philanthropy. There is no national security expertise listed because there is none to list. Pulte is the grandson of the founder of PulteGroup, one of the country's largest homebuilding companies. He parlayed that inheritance into a social media persona, a reputation for combative online posting, and eventually a Trump administration appointment to run the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the regulator that oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. He knows mortgages. He knows real estate. He knows how to throw a punch on behalf of a man who demands punches be thrown. He does not know, by any publicly available accounting, a single thing about the seventeen-agency intelligence apparatus he has just been handed.

Trump, announcing the appointment on social media Tuesday, cited Pulte's "deep experience managing the most sensitive matters in America." The most sensitive matters in America. That phrase was used to describe someone whose sensitive matters involve thirty-year fixed rates and conforming loan limits. The White House press office said Pulte "is a great selection and he will do a great job on behalf of the American people." When pressed, Dr. Mehmet Oz,  the administration's Medicare and Medicaid chief, a cardiologist turned daytime television host turned government official, a man who has no apparent standing to evaluate intelligence leadership but was at the podium anyway… offered that he trusted the president's judgment.

Senator Angus King of Maine, who was himself considered for the DNI post in 2020, said what most of the national security community was thinking: "By any objective assessment - in terms of experience, expertise, background - this appointment makes no sense."

So what does it make sense as?

It makes perfect sense as a loyalty reward. It makes perfect sense as the latest installation in an administration that has spent eighteen months demonstrating that the purpose of the federal government is not to govern but to serve as an apparatus of personal retribution and political control. To understand what Pulte's appointment means, you have to understand what Pulte has been doing at the FHFA, and you have to understand it clearly: he has been running a targeting operation.

Since his confirmation in March 2025, Pulte used his perch atop the federal mortgage finance system to dig into the private financial records of Donald Trump's political enemies. He sifted through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac databases… government-sponsored enterprises that touch the mortgage lives of millions of Americans… and emerged with criminal referrals to the Justice Department against New York Attorney General Letitia James, Senator Adam Schiff, Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, and Congressman Eric Swalwell. All Democrats. All people Trump had reasons to want prosecuted. Former officials from the FHFA described Pulte's referral process as "bizarre," "unusual," and "unheard of," noting that the FHFA's Office of Inspector General - not the director himself - is the proper body to make such referrals. Pulte bypassed the Inspector General entirely, the same Inspector General who was subsequently ousted. When asked in a CNBC interview how he obtained the mortgage documents underlying his referrals, Pulte said someone sent him a "tip." He refused to say who.

The Government Accountability Office opened an investigation into whether Pulte misused federal authority and resources. Eric Swalwell sued him, alleging a violation of the Privacy Act of 1974. The charges against Letitia James were eventually dismissed, not on the merits, but because a judge ruled the prosecutor who filed them had been illegally appointed. The referrals against Schiff, Cook, and Swalwell have not produced any indictments. What they produced was headlines, harassment, legal bills, and a demonstration that if you cross this president, a man with access to federal databases will come looking through your mortgage history for something to use against you.

That man now has access to the entire American intelligence apparatus and all of our nation’s secrets.

Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, was blunt: "Rather than selecting a respected national security professional capable of delivering independent judgments, the president has chosen an official who has demonstrated not just willingness but eagerness to use the authorities of government to pursue political retribution." CNN noted that as acting DNI, Pulte could similarly use the information available to him, now in an intelligence role, to refer cases to the Justice Department for prosecution. His predecessor at least pretended otherwise. Tulsi Gabbard made criminal referrals too, targeting a whistleblower and the inspector general whose handling of a complaint led to Trump's first impeachment. That complaint became a wide-ranging criminal investigation out of the Miami U.S. attorney's office. The pattern is not new. What's new is the degree of shamelessness.

Which brings us to Gabbard herself, and to a question that was never satisfactorily answered and now, in light of Pulte's appointment, feels considerably more urgent.

On January 28, 2026, FBI agents showed up at the Fulton County, Georgia election operations center. They had a warrant. They seized physical ballots, ballot images, tabulator tapes, and voter rolls from the 2020 presidential election…  an election that was audited, recounted, re-recounted, litigated across dozens of courts, and certified. Tulsi Gabbard was there. The Director of National Intelligence, a position explicitly created for foreign intelligence and explicitly prohibited by law from participating in domestic law enforcement, was standing outside a Georgia election office while federal agents loaded boxes of ballots onto a truck.

The explanations for why she was there shifted so many times they became a comedy of contradiction. Gabbard initially told Congress she was there at Trump's direction. Trump then said she went "at Pam's insistence," crediting Attorney General Pam Bondi. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche,Trump's former personal defense attorney, now running the Justice Department and still clearly working for one person, said Gabbard "happened to be present in Atlanta," as if the Director of National Intelligence stumbled across a federal election raid the way you stumble across a farmer's market. The day after the raid, Gabbard met with the same FBI agents who conducted the search. During that meeting, she called Trump on the phone. Trump personally thanked the agents and asked them questions about the investigation.

In her subsequent letter to Congress, Gabbard wrote that her office had been "actively reviewing intelligence reporting and assessments on election integrity" since she took office, and that there was "information and intelligence reporting suggesting that electronic voting systems being used in the United States have long been vulnerable to exploitation." She did not explain what foreign intelligence authority covers a five-year-old Georgia presidential election. She did not explain what the DNI's office was doing with domestic voting equipment assessments. She did not explain, and was never required to explain, why the nation's top intelligence chief was personally overseeing the seizure of 2020 ballots.

Senator Warner said at the time that Gabbard's presence "should alarm every American" and suggested it could be a preview of an effort by Trump to interfere in elections. He was asking the right questions. He got no real answers. And now Gabbard is gone, replaced by a man with even less experience than she had and whose entire documented skill set is finding ways to weaponize government information against people the president doesn't like.

Here is what the Federal Vacancies Reform Act says: an acting official can serve up to 210 days. Here is what the calendar says: 210 days from today gets us to approximately the end of December, well past November's midterm elections. Here is what the law says the permanent DNI "shall have": extensive national security expertise. Here is what the FVRA allows the president to do: ignore that requirement for an acting official, run out the clock, and keep someone in place through the election regardless of their qualifications.

This was not an accident. The DNI oversees eighteen federal intelligence agencies. Those agencies have access to signals intelligence, human intelligence, financial intelligence, cyber capabilities, and surveillance infrastructure that would make a partisan attack dog salivate. They also, critically, interface with the interagency processes that assess threats to U.S. elections - including the assessments of foreign interference, the evaluations of domestic election infrastructure security, and the intelligence products that inform what the public and Congress are told about the integrity of American voting systems.

Gabbard already field-tested what a DNI willing to blur those lines could do. She showed up at a ballot seizure operation. She told Congress the intelligence community had concerns about electronic voting machines. She never quite said the 2020 election was stolen, but she set up the scaffolding. Now the man who spent a year mining federal mortgage databases to build criminal cases against Trump's political opponents will be running the office that decides what the country knows about threats to its elections… in an acting capacity that conveniently expires after the votes are counted.

Trump's argument for Pulte's fitness for the job was that real estate work "overlaps with the skills needed to coordinate 18 federal agencies tasked with aspects of foreign and domestic security." No one with a working knowledge of either real estate or national intelligence said this was true. No one in the Republican Party said it wasn't. The White House said Pulte would also keep his jobs at FHFA and as chair of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, because apparently running three simultaneous federal roles without experience in any of the most complex ones is now just how things work. After all, Marco Rubio has dozens of job titles, depending on the day of the week. 

What Bill Pulte has demonstrated, repeatedly and with apparent pride, is a willingness to use whatever federal authority he holds to come after whoever the president wants targeted. He combed through mortgage databases for opposition research. He made criminal referrals that went nowhere except into headlines. He had a near-physical confrontation with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. He pressured the Justice Department to prosecute Trump's critics "even when evidence was thin," per Newsweek's reporting. He is, by every available measure, exactly the kind of person you do not put in charge of the most powerful intelligence infrastructure in human history.

Unless, of course, that's precisely the point. The countdown to the coup continues, and the clock is running down quickly. 

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