The Promotion

This morning, Donald Trump appointed Bill Pulte as acting Director of National Intelligence.

Pulte is 38 years old. He has no intelligence experience, no military background, and no national security credentials of any kind. He will keep his current job running the Federal Housing Finance Agency and chairing both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac while simultaneously overseeing all eighteen agencies of the United States intelligence community.

Trump's stated qualification for the role: Pulte has "deep experience managing the most sensitive matters in America, the safety and soundness of the Markets."

The mortgage markets. That is the qualification for running the NSA and the CIA.

Nothing says "national security expertise" like your neighborhood real estate agent. Except Pulte doesn't sell houses. He just reads your mortgage files and sends them to the Justice Department if he doesn't like your politics.

Here is what else Pulte has experience managing.

Last year, he used Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's mortgage databases to access the private financial records of the president's political enemies -- Adam Schiff, Eric Swalwell, Letitia James, Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook -- and referred them to the DOJ for prosecution. When Fannie Mae's ethics team opened an investigation into how he obtained those records, he fired the entire ethics team. Chief ethics officer, general counsel, acting inspector general. All gone. About a dozen people removed while actively investigating him.

The GAO opened its own investigation in December. It expects results in late 2026 or early 2027.

That investigation is still open. It was still open this morning when Trump handed Pulte the keys to the largest surveillance apparatus in human history.

He didn't fail upward. He got promoted for exactly what he did.

Category I flag: Appointing a loyalist currently under active federal investigation for weaponizing government databases against political opponents to run all eighteen U.S. intelligence agencies meets the abuse of power standard -- use of federal agencies and personnel for partisan political advantage.

-- Barron St. John | The Decoder Ring on Substack