His Most Voluble Internal Partisan Enforcer

Responding to: Remove Bill Pulte — The Editors · 2026-06-05

The talking point, verbatim: “without any prior experience or demonstrated interest whatsoever in the national security or intelligence sectors, he’s the head of DNI.”

What the Piece Argues

The editorial argues that President Trump’s appointment of Bill Pulte as acting director of national intelligence (DNI) is a legally and operationally preposterous decision that prioritizes partisan loyalty over statutory qualifications. It notes Pulte’s complete lack of national-security experience and highlights his recent record of using his current housing-agency access to manufacture “mortgage fraud” claims against several of the president’s political adversaries. Citing the 2004 statute that explicitly demands “extensive national security expertise” for the role, the piece concludes that the appointment treats a vital national-security office as a political prize to be handed to a “faithful myrmidon” and demands it be revoked immediately.

Receipts

The framing treats personnel loyalty and political utility as the true qualifications for managing the nation’s intelligence apparatus.

• The framing wants you to believe
  • That partisan loyalty and a willingness to deploy government resources against political enemies constitute sufficient qualifications for leading the intelligence community.
  • That temporary appointments to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence can bypass the clear statutory language requiring specialized national-security expertise.
  • That weaponizing a housing regulator’s access to private financial data to target specific officials is an appropriate “enforcement” function worth rewarding.
• What’s really going on
  • The appointment is a deliberate subversion of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, which mandates that the DNI possess “extensive national security expertise,” not private-equity real estate experience.
  • Bill Pulte’s current role has already been used to manufacture “mortgage fraud” allegations against New York Attorney General Letitia James, Senator Adam Schiff, and Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, demonstrating a pattern of converting administrative access into a political weapon.
  • The administration is attempting to normalize the practice of handing top intelligence posts to unqualified partisan operatives, treating the intelligence community as a tool for personal and political retaliation rather than national defense. (Anchor citation: Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, Sec. 1021; Trump’s Truth Social announcement; Pulte’s documented targeting efforts.)

The DEFCON Ladder

DEFCON 5 — Polite Reframe

When to use: Persuadable moderates, good-faith family, and institutionalists who value statutory process over partisan loyalty.

When a president appoints an acting director of national intelligence, the standard against which the choice is measured is not partisan enthusiasm but the law itself. The Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 does not leave room for interpretation on this matter: it explicitly states that any individual nominated to lead the intelligence community must possess “extensive national security expertise.” Decades of residential homebuilding and private-equity work, while valuable in their own right, do not satisfy a statutory requirement designed to keep the nation’s most sensitive intelligence operations in the hands of professionals who understand the weight of state secrets. When an official has already shown a willingness to use regulatory access to manufacture “mortgage fraud” allegations against political adversaries, appointing that same individual to oversee the entire intelligence architecture invites a dangerous confusion of political retaliation with national security. Upholding the statutory standard is not about protecting bureaucratic prerogatives; it is about ensuring that the people who manage our intelligence apparatus are actually qualified for the work.

DEFCON 4 — Firm Moral Superiority

When to use: Identity-protective mixed-faith actors, institutional conservatives, and readers who care about the integrity of governance.

It is one thing to staff an administration with political allies; it is entirely another to hand the keys to the nation’s intelligence community to an unqualified partisan enforcer whose chief demonstrated qualification is a willingness to weaponize government data against political opponents. The appointment treats the Office of the Director of National Intelligence as a political prize to be awarded for loyalty, ignoring the fact that the position was specifically designed to coordinate and professionalize a fragmented intelligence sector. The law requires extensive national-security expertise precisely because the stakes are too high to risk the nation’s secrets to someone whose only recent policy achievement was a “50-year mortgage” proposal for new homebuyers. When an appointee uses his regulatory perch to dig up dirt on the New York attorney general, a sitting senator, and a Federal Reserve governor, he has already shown that he views his office as a personal political weapon. A national-security apparatus cannot be governed effectively by individuals who view every dossier as a potential hit piece and every statute as a hurdle to be bypassed for the president’s convenience. The institutions that protect this country require leaders who understand their purpose, not loyalists who understand only how to deploy them.

DEFCON 3 — Mockery and Ridicule

When to use: selectively amnesiac right-wing partisans, bystanders watching the spectacle — open funny-before-devastating.

So National Review has discovered that Bill Pulte is unqualified for a job. This is exciting. It took them two appointments to get there.

At the first stop — FHFA, the agency that oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and their combined more than $8 trillion in mortgage guarantees — the editors pronounced him qualified. “Decades of family experience in residential homebuilding,” they wrote. Residential homebuilding! For a job whose actual duties involve setting capital requirements for mortgage securitizers under a regulatory framework designed to prevent the systemic collapse that required a roughly $191.5 billion Treasury bailout the last time these institutions were under-capitalized. The logic appears to be that if you have built houses, you are qualified to regulate the people who finance the people who buy the houses — which is like arguing that because you have driven a car, you are qualified to run the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The distance between the claimed expertise and the actual mission is the whole joke, and the editors, at the time, declined to tell it.

Now Pulte has been moved to the DNI. The editors have located the statute. “Any individual nominated for appointment as Director of National Intelligence shall have extensive national security expertise.” They can quote it! They can point at it! They have discovered, two years into the administration, that statutory qualification language exists and that a president who has been ignoring it everywhere else might also ignore it here. This is the editorial equivalent of a homeowner noticing the roof is on fire after having spent two years telling the neighbors the smoke in the kitchen was just dinner.

The piece’s money line is that Pulte “has become better-known in Washington as one of Trump’s most voluble internal partisan enforcers, using the access to private data his position gives him to dig up as much weaponizable information as possible about Trump’s political enemies.” Yes. And which position was that? FHFA. The position the editors told us he was qualified for. The position whose data holdings — the mortgage records of millions of Americans — were in his hands before the DNI job was ever under discussion. The weaponization the piece now finds disqualifying was already underway at the agency it pronounced unremarkable. The only thing that changed between the first appointment and the second is that the second one comes with a statute the editors can read aloud.

So here is the editorial position, stated plainly: patronage is fine when the regulatory agency has weak statutory language and holds the data of ordinary homeowners; patronage becomes disqualifying when the agency has strong statutory language and the targets might include people whose mortgages aren’t the issue. Run the data weaponization at FHFA, and the publication calls you qualified. Promote you to DNI, and suddenly you are Roscoe Conkling’s worst nightmare. The principle is not institutional integrity; the principle is that the magazine wants the patronage directed at people it does not mind seeing patronized.

DEFCON 2 — Aggressive Villainization

When to use: Mixed-to-bad-faith actors, partisan operatives, and readers who recognize that institutional decay is already underway.

The appointment is not an accident; it is a feature. It signals a deliberate shift from treating the intelligence community as a protected, professional apparatus to treating it as a partisan weapon to be handed to whoever hits hardest for the president. The man chosen has no national-security background because national security is not the objective. The objective is retaliation, and the man’s entire recent operational history proves it. Using the access provided by a housing regulator to manufacture “mortgage fraud” allegations against the New York attorney general, a United States senator, and a Federal Reserve governor is not governance. It is the weaponization of administrative privilege. By rewarding that exact behavior with the acting directorship of national intelligence, the administration is openly declaring that statutory requirements exist only for opponents, and that the intelligence community is just another department to be conquered and turned toward political warfare. A national-security chief without national-security expertise is not a caretaker; he is a saboteur placed inside the security apparatus to ensure it does what the president wants, rather than what the law requires.

DEFCON 1 — Nuclear Satire

When to use: bad-faith actors, performative trolls — also catharsis for the people who have been watching this farce with their own mortgage data in the files.

The National Review editorial board, having spent two years assuring its readers that a real-estate heir with a grudge and a database is a perfectly reasonable choice to oversee more than $8 trillion in mortgage guarantees, has now discovered that the same man might not be ideally suited to run the entire United States intelligence apparatus. The discovery was prompted, the editors explain, by the existence of a statute — a piece of paper with words on it! — that says the DNI should have “extensive national security expertise.” Statutes, it turns out, are real, and the editors have found one.

They did not find one at FHFA. They did not go looking for one. The Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008 established the agency and gave its director sole authority over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s capital frameworks, conservatorship terms, and eventual release — but the statute does not say “shall have extensive financial-regulatory expertise” in the same quotable cadence, so the editors concluded that homebuilding experience would do. Bill Pulte’s family built houses. Houses have mortgages. Mortgages are what Fannie and Freddie securitize. This is, in the editors’ view, a chain of reasoning. A man who has poured a foundation is, by transitive property, qualified to set capital requirements for the enterprises whose collapse required the largest financial bailout in American history. The logic is so aggressively circular that it qualifies as a structural engineering feat in its own right.

The piece’s central indictment of Pulte’s DNI fitness is that he used his FHFA position “to dig up as much weaponizable information as possible about Trump’s political enemies — New York Attorney General Letitia James, Senator Adam Schiff, and Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook.” The editors present this as the argument against promoting him. It is, read carefully, also the argument that he should never have been at FHFA in the first place — an argument the editors themselves declined to make when the appointment was before them. They are now in the position of citing the abuse they previously ignored as the reason the abuser should not be given a larger playground. The abuse is real. The selective objection to it is the editorial equivalent of a building inspector who waves through the foundation pour and then files an emergency-stop order when the roof framing starts.

The piece gestures at institutionalist gravitas — “even Roscoe Conkling might blush at the temerity of it” — which is a wonderful sentence, because Conkling was a 19th-century Republican senator who resigned in a huff over patronage disputes and whose career was largely defined by his insistence that Senate prerogatives over appointments should be defended against presidential encroachment. The editors are invoking Conkling against a DNI appointment while having declined to invoke him — or anyone — against the prior FHFA appointment, which violated the same Senate-advice-and-consent norm they now suddenly recall exists. The ghost of Roscoe Conkling is being asked to haunt only the second floor of the building.

And then there is the ODNI itself. The piece calls it “superfluous,” “a needless layer of bureaucracy,” a panicked “do something” reorganization that “should not exist.” The editorial board of National Review wants the agency abolished. It also wants its director appointed on statutory merit rather than patronage. The position is that an agency that should not exist must nonetheless be staffed by a qualified professional rather than a loyalist — that the empty chair at an unnecessary agency is a constitutional crisis if filled by the wrong person, but not if filled by a competent person, because the competence of the person staffing the agency the magazine wants eliminated is the thing that matters. This is not a personnel argument. It is an argument that the personnel have become more important than the agency — which is to say, it is an argument that the magazine is more invested in the appearance of institutional integrity than in institutional integrity, because institutional integrity would have required objecting to the FHFA appointment two years ago, and that would have been politically inconvenient.

DEFCON 1+ — Prophetic Indictment

When to use: the reader moved by moral authority with an edge — the prophetic register, canonical sources, the indictment sharpened by scripture.

There is a passage in the book of Jeremiah — chapter eight, the twelfth verse — that the editors of National Review would benefit from sitting with for a while. The prophet surveys a people who have committed abominations and asks the diagnostic question that separates genuine moral reckoning from its performance: “Were they ashamed when they had committed abomination? No, they were not at all ashamed; they did not know how to blush.”

The editors have located their capacity to blush. It arrived, by their own account, when Bill Pulte was promoted from FHFA to DNI — when the patronage reached an agency whose statute they could quote. The prior appointment, the one that put him in charge of the mortgage data of millions of Americans, produced no blush. The abuse of that position — “using the access to private data his position gives him to dig up as much weaponizable information as possible about Trump’s political enemies” — was, by their own narration, underway on their watch, and they pronounced the man qualified. Jeremiah’s diagnostic is precise: the blushing arrived not when the abomination was committed but when it became convenient to notice.

The editorial invokes institutional integrity in the key of the Federalist — Roscoe Conkling, the Senate’s advice-and-consent prerogative, the statutory language of the intelligence-reform law. It is the piety of the whitewashed tomb, which the Gospel of Matthew names in the twenty-third chapter, verse twenty-seven: beautiful on the outside, full of dead men’s bones within. The magazine has spent the better part of a decade arguing that the administrative state is constitutionally illegitimate — that independent agencies exercise power Congress cannot properly delegate, that their directors should be removable at will, that the entire edifice of the post-New Deal regulatory apparatus is a departure from the founding design. The FHFA is precisely such an agency. Its director exercises precisely such power. And when the administration placed a political enforcer in that seat and the enforcer began weaponizing the agency’s data holdings against the president’s enemies, the magazine’s institutionalist objections were mysteriously inoperative. The whitewash was fresh; the tomb was presentable.

Now the enforcer has been moved to the DNI — an agency the magazine itself calls “superfluous,” a “needless layer,” a panic response that “should not exist.” The editors want the ODNI abolished and they want its director appointed on merit. This is not a position; it is a posture — the body arranged for effect, the argument dissolved by its own premises. Amos, at the fifth chapter, gives the image: “You have turned justice into wormwood, and righteousness you have cast down to the ground.” The magazine has turned its institutionalist vocabulary into wormwood — bitter at the DNI, sweet at the FHFA, the same words doing opposite work depending on whose data was being weaponized and whether the editors had decided the agency in question was one they wanted to defend.

What the editorial actually argues — beneath the Conkling references and the statutory quotation — is that the president’s personnel system should confine its norm-breaking to the agencies whose destruction the magazine’s own ideological project has long sought. Patronize the housing-finance regulator; the editors will call it qualification. Patronize the intelligence director; the editors will call it a constitutional embarrassment. The principle is not the integrity of the appointment power. The principle is that the magazine wants the patronage directed at agencies it does not mind seeing gutted, and it wants the integrity-talk reserved for the agencies whose work it has decided, in this particular case, to treat as worth defending. That is not a moral argument. It is a scheduling preference.

DEFCON 1++ — Profane Scorched-Earth

When to use: full catharsis, gloves all the way off — the reader who needs the receipts and the profanity in the same paragraph, rage made cathartic for the people whose mortgage data are in the files.

Oh, fuck this editorial.

National Review has spent two years telling us that Bill Pulte — a real-estate heir whose only qualification for running the federal housing-finance regulator was the last name his grandfather built a homebuilding company under — was a reasonable choice to oversee Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and their combined more than $8 trillion in mortgage guarantees. He was “qualified,” they wrote. “Decades of family experience in residential homebuilding.” Residential homebuilding! For an agency whose actual statutory mission is to set capital requirements for government-sponsored enterprises that required a nearly $192 billion bailout the last time their capital frameworks failed — an agency whose director has lawful access to the Social Security numbers, credit histories, employment records, and loan-performance data of every American whose mortgage passes through the GSEs. The editors looked at this arrangement and pronounced it fine because the guy’s family once poured concrete. The intellectual architecture here is that knowing how to frame a subdivision qualifies you to regulate the securitization of single-family mortgage risk — which is the same logic as arguing that because you have eaten at a restaurant you are qualified to run the FDA. It is so breathtakingly stupid it qualifies as editorial malpractice of the first fucking order, and it was published, and it was meant to be taken seriously.

Now Pulte has been moved to the DNI. The same editors who called him qualified for FHFA have discovered that he has “no prior experience or demonstrated interest whatsoever in the national security or intelligence sectors.” They have found the statute! “Any individual nominated for appointment as Director of National Intelligence shall have extensive national security expertise.” They can quote it in their editorial voice, with the italics and everything. They have become, overnight, strict textualists of the intelligence-reform statute — the same editorial board that spends the rest of the year arguing that the administrative state is an unconstitutional accretion of power and that Congress cannot delegate regulatory authority to unaccountable agencies. The consistency here is that there is no fucking consistency; the only operating principle is that the magazine will defend institutional norms at the agencies it wants to keep and ignore them at the agencies it wants to see gutted.

And here is the part that really cooks: the editorial’s own indictment of Pulte — the reason they say he should not be DNI — is that he used his FHFA position “to dig up as much weaponizable information as possible about Trump’s political enemies.” That abuse happened at the agency they said he was qualified to run. They are citing the abuse they previously ignored as the reason the abuser should not be promoted. This is like the arson investigator who certifies the first fire as accidental and then, when the same guy burns down a second building, announces that the second fire is suspicious because the arsonist had a history of starting fires — which the investigator himself previously cleared, and the editors fucking missed it. The editorial is self-indicting on its face. The weaponization of private data was disqualifying at FHFA, and the editors missed it. They are not the people to lecture anyone about institutional integrity now.

The piece gestures at “even Roscoe Conkling might blush at the temerity of it,” which is a very serious-sounding sentence that means absolutely nothing in context, because Conkling — a 19th-century Republican senator best remembered for resigning in a snit over a patronage fight and then losing the subsequent election — would presumably also have had something to say about the FHFA appointment if anyone had bothered to invoke him at the time. But no one did, because the magazine was too busy normalizing the patronage at the agency whose independence was inconvenient to defend. The ghost of Roscoe Conkling is being asked to haunt only the second floor when the fire started in the basement.

And then the editors drop the mask entirely: the ODNI is “superfluous,” “a needless layer of bureaucracy,” a panicked “do something” response that “should not exist.” The agency should not exist, but its director must be appointed on merit rather than patronage, because the integrity of the appointment to the position that should not exist is the hill the magazine has decided to die on. The editors want the building demolished but they want the demolition crew to be credentialed. The argument has collapsed into pure posture — institutionalist vocabulary being deployed to defend an agency the magazine wants abolished while ignoring the prior abuse at an agency it was content to see captured. This is not a principled objection to patronage. It is a horseshit request that the patronage be confined to the agencies whose destruction the magazine’s ideological project has always sought — and that the rest of us pretend the request is about norms.

The data of millions of American homeowners was in Bill Pulte’s hands for two years. National Review called him qualified. They do not get to clutch their goddamn pearls now.

The Deeper Breakdown

The central mechanism driving this appointment is the substitution of partisan utility for statutory competence in the leadership of the intelligence community. Bill Pulte was selected not because he possesses the “extensive national security expertise” mandated by Section 1021 of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, but because his recent actions as a political enforcer within the Federal Housing Finance Agency demonstrated a high willingness to convert administrative access into a political weapon.

The receipts prove this substitution is operational, not incidental:

• The Statutory Breach: The 2004 IRTPA explicitly sets an expertise threshold for the DNI. Pulte’s background is entirely in residential real estate and private equity, sectors that have zero operational overlap with intelligence coordination, counterterrorism, or foreign-policy analysis.
• The Weaponization Record: During his time leading Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Pulte actively directed efforts to use private mortgage data to investigate and manufacture allegations of “mortgage fraud” against named political figures, including New York Attorney General Letitia James, Senator Adam Schiff, and Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. This operational history confirms that his primary demonstrated competency is not national security, but partisan retaliation using federal data.
• The Institutional Cost: By rewarding this behavior with the acting directorship, the administration signals that the intelligence apparatus is an extension of the president’s personal political warfare machine rather than a protected, professional entity. The immediate impact is the erosion of institutional norms and the demoralization of career intelligence professionals, but the long-term stake is the integrity of U.S. intelligence operations themselves.

The operational reality of the current appointment stands on the record — and the statute has not moved an inch.