What damage will Bill Pulte do as “acting” director of national intelligence?
Donald Trump has brushed aside bipartisan rejection of Pulte as the acting coordinator of 18 national intelligence agencies to insist that Pulte severely cut the staff of the agency and then delve into records in search of anything to show foreign interference in the 2020 election – or perhaps the current one.
Forget that multiple investigations have failed to turn up evidence of election “rigging” that Trump insists must have taken place for him to lose to Joe Biden six years ago. The Trump investigative style of picking targets first and then looking for crimes to fit them has become the hallmark of Justice under Trump.
Trump went so far this week as to interfere and cancel the Senate’s confirmation hearing for Jay Clayton, currently U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, as a permanent DNI hire replacing the ousted Tulsi Gabbard. The sole explanation that has arisen is so that Pulte can get into the job temporarily to do Trump’s anti-election bidding – as Pulte has done by abusing his job heading the federal mortgage authorities to mine data for criminal use against Trump political opponents.
Do we really think that Pulte will do things that Clayton will not? Gabbard did not balk at going to Georgia with the FBI on a raid of Fulton Country election records from 2020. She could offer no understandable explanation for being there other than the most general references to possible involvement of foreign governments in seeking to sway American elections – the kind of thing the U.S. does every day in other countries that most recently include Colombia.
Relying on Intelligence. Or not.
Of course, the obsession on made-up foreign influence over imagined schemes to tilt election machine software to turn Trump votes magically into Biden votes but not touch any other race skips over the bigger damage being done here – the undercutting of national intelligence altogether.
To Trump, the huge communications spying networks that the government runs only seem useful to gather information about his perceived enemies. But the bigger danger is that Trump is ignoring critical national security information and advice that are meant to be harvested before policy is created.
Pulte’s early promises to drop hundreds of national security analysts to meet Trump’s demands will threaten our information sharing with other nations, of course.
Apart from all else that is crazy about Trump’s war of choice with Iran, the nuttiest part is that he ignored specific advice that an attack on Iran would spur Iranian retaliation on Gulf nations and the strangulation of global shipping of oil, fertilizer and other necessary goods through the Strait of Hormuz. Trump’s deal with Iran should be seen as proof on needing more reliance on good intelligence rather than the evident Trump attitude of shunning it.
The deal shows that Trump’s government was forced by a less-strong Iran to bow to the economic slowdown that Iran caused. It was all avoidable, but Trump trusted his gut and counsel from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over what he was being told by U.S. intelligence agencies.
That is why even Republican senators are pushing back against Pulte being named to an office for which he has absolutely no background. If “national security” matters so much to this administration, appointment of Pulte for even a day makes no sense.
And Trump has no need for intelligence he ignores.
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