Trump's intelligence problem
From Tulsi Gabbard to Bill Pulte, the president's choices to lead the nation's spy agencies keep getting dumber.
Just when the president’s Cabinet choices appeared to have offended every conceivable standard, Jay Clayton found a new frontier this week: The federal prosecutor and nominee for director of national intelligence became the first of Donald Trump’s Cabinet picks to be blocked by Trump himself.
Following the underwhelming tenure of the post’s outgoing occupant, Tulsi Gabbard, did Trump finally realize that the director of national intelligence should have some experience in, um, intelligence?
Nah. He just wanted to make way for an even less qualified and more frightening choice.
Clayton, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, would be Trump’s second nominee with no intelligence background to hold the job, which originated as one of several supposed post-9/11 reforms still haunting the country. But he looks like an unimpeachable choice compared with Trump’s first preference, Bill Pulte, whom the president is plotting to install as acting director without the Senate’s consent.
Before Trump elevated him to the upper ranks of our national government, Pulte was best known for inheriting the fortune his eponymous grandfather made selling tract housing and giving away bits of it to people who agreed to follow him on Twitter. In lieu of the Cabinet post Pulte wanted, Trump nominated him last year to serve as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, an important if obscure job that Pulte remade in his and Trump’s image, which is to say frivolous and obtrusive.
After trying to ingratiate himself with the administration the usual way — by firing federal employees and otherwise hobbling his own agency — Pulte ultimately succeeded by leveling a series of trumped-up mortgage fraud and other accusations against the president’s perceived enemies, including California Sen. Adam Schiff, New York Attorney General Letitia James, former Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and Fed Governor Lisa Cook. In his spare time, he also appears to have encouraged Trump to publish a post depicting himself as AI Jesus and provoked Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent into threatening to “kick his ass.”
For all his bloodthirsty enthusiasm, Pulte has proved remarkably inept at the dirty work of carrying out the president’s vendettas; so far, all of his targets remain free men and women. His attempts on James helped debunk the long-held ham-sandwich theory — that a prosecutor could get a grand jury to indict a pile of lunch meat — when two panels refused to hand up charges against the prosecutor.
But Trump, as is his wont, has overlooked Pulte’s incompetence in favor of his favorite quality in an underling, slavish sycophancy. The president seems to have decided that all this go-getter needs is a perch for which he is even more wildly unfit. And he is eager enough to let Pulte loose within some of the government’s most sensitive precincts that he was willing to block the Senate’s confirmation of his own nominee.
Not that Clayton, recently seen raising spurious doubts about elections in California and beyond, is a promising choice for the post either. Nor was the outgoing director, a former Democratic congresswoman and also-ran presidential candidate with a history of parroting Russian and Syrian talking points. Gabbard, who became so ostracized within the administration that she was posting snapshots of herself doing yoga on a beach as U.S. forces prepared to invade Venezuela, shamelessly but belatedly tried to regain her good standing by promoting Trump-friendly conspiracy theories and participating in an ominous raid on election offices in Atlanta.
Even in this context, however, the Pulte pick was so beyond the pale that several Republican senators, perhaps further motivated by Trump’s newfound predilection for ending their careers by endorsing their primary opponents, momentarily awakened from their collective vegetative state and tried to do their jobs. They joined Democrats in threatening to block a reauthorization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and tried to expedite confirmation of Clayton to head off a Pulte interregnum. And it must be said that speeding one of the president’s nominations to head off another is a striking example of the kind of halfhearted and ineffectual opposition that can be expected of Republican lawmakers.
Possibly because the Republicans are so unpracticed in this art, their effort failed. Trump told Clayton not to appear for the confirmation hearing and said he would refuse to sign a FISA bill without simultaneous approval of the “SAVE America Act,” a voter suppression measure that some Republicans have also hesitated to approve.
Suppressing the vote is the unifying purpose here. Pulte can be expected to use the intelligence post not only to harass dissenters but also to meddle with the midterm election with more gusto than Gabbard could muster. And preventing a free and fair election, after all, is Trump’s only hope for holding on to a Congress so entirely incapable of effective opposition.
Bill Pulte. Yet another new name to learn about ... and to hate.
The Republican Congress must be held accountable for serious dereliction of duty. The punishment should be financial and a forever ban on any elected or appointed public office!!