New Tulsi Is Here To Eat Toenails And Sic CIA On Trump's Enemies, Is All Out Of Toenails

A terrible appointment even by Trump's degraded standards.

There was a moment about two weeks ago when it looked as if overripe shit-gibbon Bill Pulte was not going to replace Tulsi Gabbard as the Director of National Intelligence after all.

You’ll recall that after Gabbard announced her resignation as DNI last month, Donald Trump named Pulte as (Acting) DNI despite a lack of credentials that was alarming even by Trump nominee standards (and also literally illegal). Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, is a real estate heir whose biggest talent is getting people to loathe him on sight. He had spent his first year in the Trump administration trawling through mortgage paperwork to gin up bullshit criminal mortgage “fraud” cases against high-profile Democrats that Trump doesn’t like. That is, when he wasn’t busy making Scott Bessent mad enough to threaten to kick his ass.

In short, the beady-eyed jackwagon had zero background in any field that was even intelligence-adjacent. Shoot, if you served in your high school’s JROTC, you are probably more qualified for the gig than Bill Pulte.

But Pulte had the one qualification that matters to Trump: a servility to the president so complete that if he turned up tomorrow having had plastic surgery to make himself look fatter and more orange, you would nod with your complete lack of surprise.

But then, a bit of a shock: So many Senate Republicans pushed back on the nomination that Trump briefly replaced Pulte with Jay Clayton, an election denier and lickspittle who also sucks, but at least is not so unlikable that he makes a friendless loser like Ted Cruz look popular.

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Then last week, Trump changed his mind again and announced Pulte would be (Acting) DNI after all, or at least until Republicans pass the SAVE Act. That is the hunk of crap of a voting bill addressing nonexistent voter fraud with measures like “don’t let married women vote,” because everything is worse than you could possibly believe.

Trump also announced he would not sign any extension of Section 702 of FISA, the controversial surveillance law that Democrats had said they would hold up if Pulte became DNI, unless Pulte became DNI. So basically, we’ve got one giant game of legislative chicken in which terrible laws are being held hostage until an unqualified dirtbag takes over the nation’s most high-level intelligence job. All in the middle of a war, which does not seem like the moment you want chaos at the top of your intelligence community.

Who says American democracy is in a death spiral?

The upshot is that Pulte took over for Gabbard on Friday. And on Monday morning, the mass “deep state firings” began.

Even before he started, Pulte was already giving orders:

Pulte had ordered staff members to identify 400 employees to be fired from the National Counterterrorism Center, which is part of the U.S. intelligence community, in the coming weeks.

Pulte issued the instruction late Thursday — before he officially took over[.]

There really is nothing Bill Pulte likes more than firing people. He fired 14 people from the board of directors of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac when he took them over last year. He fired ethics watchdogs who were allegedly looking into one of his friends. He fired over 200 people at Fannie and Freddie on the dubious proposition that they were DEI hires. Silly employees, don’t they know that jobs should be reserved for unqualified real estate scions instead?

Cutting intelligence jobs was Pulte’s big public mandate from Trump. This after Gabbard reduced the size of her agency by 30 percent in the first six months of her reign in 2025. It makes a lot of sense from Trump’s point of view, since he has zero interest in what intelligence agencies tell him anyway. He prefers to go with his gut feeling, which as Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan have been telling people as they shill their new book, is why he ignored virtually the entire intelligence and national security communities telling him that bombing Iran would not cause its government to fall. What does he need with people who know stuff and things?

Democrats on the House and Senate Intelligence Committees have leaped into action, doing what they do best: Write a strongly worded letter telling Pulte he better not.

Given your lack of experience within the Intelligence Community, it is difficult to imagine that in such a short amount of time you have already developed fully informed views as to how to shrink ODNI without incurring risks to national security. Making significant structural changes to ODNI, to include a reduction in force, is not an appropriate course of action for anyone in an acting capacity, let alone without consultation with Congress, and you should refrain from doing so.

To be fair, there isn’t much Democrats can do besides send strongly worded letters. There is just something hilarious about looking at Bill Pulte, a man who is such an asshole that the board of his own family’s company fired him, and wagging your finger at him like a nun overseeing recess.

But the points the letter makes, that Pulte a) has zero experience or qualifications for this job and b) has shown such a willingness to trawl private documents looking for dirt that the thought of him having unfettered access to America’s most highly classified intelligence is both absurd and terrifying, still stand.

That our intelligence bureaucracy might be bloated is certainly possible. But Bill Pulte is no more qualified to evaluate that than we are. The idea that this sweaty chunk of insecurity is going to engage in mass firings in the intelligence community at any time, but especially when the nation’s situation with Iran is nowhere close to being resolved, is utterly insane.

Giving Pulte this job is like shooting your foot off just before the start of a marathon because you don’t think you really need two feet to go jogging. You can do it, but stumbling and falling flat on your face is inevitable.

[NBC News]

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