Trump Goes for Broke with MAGA Fanatic Bill Pulte to Run U.S. Intelligence
The Federal Housing Finance Agency director is notorious for going out of the way to demean, smear and investigate officials on Trump's enemies list
I’ve often thought of Steve Carell’s hilarious performance as the feckless boss in The Office while observing the ups and downs—mostly downs—of our many directors of National Intelligence. A few years after the ODNI’s first director, John Negroponte, took the job in 2006, I learned he was taking leisurely two hour lunch breaks at The University Club in downtown Washington, where he’d often sign up for a steambath and massage and spend time in the reading room catching up on the day’s newspapers and magazines.
“He’s figured out the job,” I wrote back then. Being DNI was “not worth a bucket of warm spit,” in the immortal words of FDR’s Vice President John Nance Garner. It hardly needed saying that the CIA, which had ruled the intelligence roost since 1947, saw the ODNI, founded to coordinate the work of the sprawling 17-agency intelligence community after their failure to prevent the 9/11 attacks, as a mere annoyance. The FBI, likewise, respectfully declined the ODNI’s request to oversee its counterterrorism work. Over time, many of the agencies were said to be dumping underperforming employees into the ODNI, which grew and grew … and grew, way beyond its original personnel ceiling.
And the job ate up many a DNI.
