The real reason Bill Pulte was named director of national intelligence

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When President Trump named Bill Pulte, the current head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, as the interim director of national intelligence, a loud, collective “Huh!?” could be heard all over Washington. Pulte has no intelligence or national security experience, as required by law. He doesn’t even have a security clearance.

But an intelligence background isn’t necessary for the task Trump is apparently handing over to Pulte: trying to prove the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

Trump has said he appointed Pulte to replace outgoing DNI Tulsi Gabbard because the agency is bloated. He wants Pulte to fire people, even though Gabbard had already been thinning the ranks.

Now, that’s not necessarily a bad idea. Many think the Cabinet-level agency, which was created in 2004 in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, is redundant. For example, the Wall Street Journal calls the director of national intelligence “a useless job and bureaucracy,” and suggested, “The intelligence state is large enough without the DNI. The CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the rest can do the job.”

But if the goal is to downsize or shut down the agency, perhaps transferring vital functions and experts to a different agency, why put Pulte in charge? It would make more sense to hand another title to Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Or better yet, put CIA Director John Racfliffe in charge of the drawdown. He is the most qualified to determine which jobs and people must be retained and which ones could be eliminated.

Turning to Ratcliffe would have made perfect sense if Trump’s primary goal was to downsize the agency, so why choose Pulte?

Two reasons: First, Pulte has recently demonstrated he will do anything to please Trump. As head of the housing agency, Pulte went digging through the mortgage loans of people against whom Trump wants to retaliate — especially Federal Reserve Bank Governor Lisa Cook and Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) — hoping to find a problem and then urging the Department of Justice to prosecute them for mortgage fraud. When ProPublica pointed out that three of Trump’s Cabinet members may have similar issues, the White House stepped in to defend them. That’s because it’s not about exposing mortgage fraud; it is about exposing people on Trump’s enemies list.

The second reason goes back to Gabbard’s actions while still in charge.

Last January, Gabbard led an FBI raid on the Fulton County, Ga., elections office. The previous December, the Department of Justice sent Fulton County a letter requesting “all used and void ballots, stubs of all ballots, signature envelopes, and corresponding envelope digital files from the 2020 General Election in Fulton County.” This elections investigation is part of a broader multi-state sweep by the Trump administration.

But Fulton County wasn’t Gabbard’s first raid. She had previously seized voter machines from Puerto Rico — even though the U.S. territory cannot vote in federal elections. The Guardian explains the effort was “a push by Donald Trump supporters to revive a long-discredited conspiracy theory purporting to link Venezuela to Trump’s 2020 electoral defeat.”

And Fulton County wasn’t the last raid. Last March the Trump administration subpoenaed the voting records of Arizona’s Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix.

Trump has repeatedly claimed the 2020 election was stolen, and that new evidence proving his assertion would be revealed soon. No such evidence has ever emerged.

We don’t know what Gabbard’s investigations found, but we can assume it’s been a bust so far, because Trump would have publicly announced his stolen-election claims had finally been vindicated. If someone could, after six years, provide credible evidence that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, that person would be Donald Trump’s best friend for life.

Which isn’t to say there isn’t election fraud. There is. But fraud usually occurs in very small numbers and certainly not enough to overturn an election where millions of votes determine the winner.

Trump’s plan, then, is to send an unprincipled ally who’s only goal is to please Trump to the agency that has the voting material. The president even indicated this was one of his reasons. The Wall Street Journal reports, “The president said he wants Pulte to release more classified documents related to issues such as his 2020 loss to Joe Biden.”

And there you have it. Pulte isn’t meant to manage an intelligence agency, but to find something — anything, real or manufactured — that will finally justify Trump’s stolen-election claims.

Merrill Matthews is the Texas state chair of Our Republican Legacy.

The real reason Bill Pulte was named director of national intelligence

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