Just over a week ago, the question facing the American “intelligence community” — all of the assorted spies and spooks at 18 different agencies — ran roughly as follows: Are things so bad that they can only get better? Or is there another step down?
There was another step down, it turns out, and it is Bill Pulte, whom U.S. President Donald Trump has tapped to replace Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence, a position created after the attacks of Sep. 11, 2001, to bring a semblance of coordination to the institutions analyzing the worst threats facing Americans.
Gabbard — who resigned for good and private reasons unrelated to her tenure — had been bad: A colorful but unqualified conspiracy theorist in her political career, as DNI she politicized the spy agencies by sidelining analysts who produced narratives that were inconvenient to the president: that Venezuela was not an imminent threat to national security, say, or that the election of 2020 was not in fact “stolen” from Trump.
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