210 Days to Break an Intelligence Community

An Acting DNI can still leave lasting scars.

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William Pulte’s temporary appointment as Acting DNI will have effects that outlast his tenure: retribution, politicized intelligence access, personnel purges, and reduced confidence in the legal certifications that support key intelligence surveillance operations.

You can destroy a lot of stuff in 210 days. You can also ensure long-lasting damage to the entire Intelligence Community if all you care about is retribution. That may be where the appointment of William Pulte as Acting Director of National Intelligence (ADNI) puts us.

Pulte is best known for using his current position as head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, scrounging through the mortgage records of Trump’s perceived political enemies and making criminal referrals to the Department of Justice, now run by Trump’s former personal lawyer Todd Blanche. What can this manifestly unqualified attack dog do in his temporary position as ADNI? The answer is “a lot.”

First, there is the Joe DiGenova-led criminal investigation into unfounded allegations of election fraud that is likely to wind up in Aileen Cannon’s courtroom in southern Florida. What better ally to paw through classified information than William Pulte? Pulte has been ordered to start firing people in the Intelligence Community. It is not clear if his DOGE-like mandate is limited to the DNI or if he will be directed to reach into specific agencies such as the CIA, NSA, and NGA to carry out Trump’s orders.

Trump already has announced that he will not nominate Pulte for the DNI position. So with no reputation to be concerned about, no concern about a confirmation hearing, no apparent qualifications for the job, a curious past, and bipartisan concern about his nomination because of his scorched earth policy towards Trump’s perceived enemies, Democratic Senators made an effort to prevent Pulte from serving even as Acting DNI. Such a no-brainer. And the result? The Senate Republicans once again folded like a cheap umbrella. Given the threat to the nation’s security that a recognized dangerous incompetent with a proven track record of political hackery presents, the Republicans once again chose cowardice over courage, and sycophancy over country.

The immediate cost of the Republican failure to stop this interim appointment may well be the termination of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act’s Section 702 extension. Section 702 is the bedrock of the Intelligence Community’s technical surveillance program, and its renewal has never been guaranteed. Bipartisan support, together with significant reforms affecting the FBI primarily, was sufficient to renew Section 702 in 2024 without a controversial warrant requirement. Section 702 authority was set to expire this past April, has been extended twice, and is now set to expire on June 12.

Section 702 authorizations are based on annual certifications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) signed by the Director of National Intelligence and the Attorney General and attesting to the legality of targeting, minimization, and querying procedures. Reasonable people can question the value of certifications signed by soon-to-be-former DNI Tulsi Gabbard and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche given their role in weaponizing foreign intelligence and the criminal investigation process. It is certainly worth asking how the FISC might view the credibility of a Section 702 certification signed by William Pulte. Opponents were already lining up to argue against reauthorization before the Pulte announcement; Pulte’s appointment will only make a clean renewal less likely.

Those who wondered whether there could be a worse pick for DNI than Tulsi Gabbard have their answer. So here’s what the new Acting DNI is likely to spend his time on: election mischief from elections past; mischief connected with challenging the validity of the 2026 midterms complete with political misuse of intelligence information; a purge of the intelligence community; 210 days of overseeing the President’s Daily Brief and representing the United States Intelligence Community to the world; access to whatever sensitive intelligence his creative mind takes a fancy to; and perhaps, as a bonus, a decisive role in killing Section 702.

And the Retribution Train rolls on.

James Petrila spent over thirty years as a lawyer in the Intelligence Community, working at the National Security Agency and, for most of his career,at the Central Intelligence Agency. He has taught courses on counterterrorism law and legal issues at the CIA at the George Washington University School of Law. He is currently a senior advisor to the Institute for the Study of States of Exception and is a member of The Steady State.

Founded in 2016, The Steady State is a nonprofit 501(c)(4) organization of more than 400 former senior national security professionals. Our membership includes former officials from the CIA, FBI, Department of State, Department of Defense, and Department of Homeland Security. Drawing on deep expertise across national security disciplines, including intelligence, diplomacy, military affairs, and law, we advocate for constitutional democracy, the rule of law, and the preservation of America’s national security institutions.