The Spy Who Came in From the Mortgage Office
Bill Pulte spent his first year in government using housing records to hunt Trump's enemies. Now he'll have the entire intelligence community to work with.
By the time Tulsi Gabbard announced last month that she was stepping down as director of national intelligence, the position had already been so thoroughly politicized that it was hard to imagine her successor making things meaningfully worse. Then Donald Trump named Bill Pulte.
Pulte, who turns 37 this year, is the grandson of William Pulte, founder of PulteGroup, one of the largest homebuilding companies in American history. He has no background in intelligence, no experience in national security, and no apparent qualifications for overseeing the seventeen agencies that comprise the United States intelligence community beyond his demonstrated willingness to use whatever institutional power he holds as a weapon against people Donald Trump doesn't like.
That last quality, it turns out, is apparently the one that matters most.
Trump announced the appointment Tuesday morning on Truth Social, citing Pulte's "deep experience managing the most sensitive matters in America, the safety and soundness of the Markets, and over 10 Trillion Dollars at Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac." The citation is telling in its absurdity: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are government-sponsored mortgage enterprises, not intelligence operations. One former Trump official — speaking sarcastically, but not anonymously enough to matter — summed up the credentialing logic this way: "Building homes is very similar to managing a 17-agency U.S. intelligence community."
What Pulte actually did at the Federal Housing Finance Agency is the story that demands telling before he moves his desk to Liberty Crossing.
When Pulte took over the FHFA in March 2025, he moved quickly and conspicuously. He drove out hundreds of employees. He replaced industry veterans with politically connected loyalists, including a business partner of Donald Trump Jr. He ordered staff to hand over control of the Fannie Mae account on X. He proposed a 50-year mortgage. He promoted cryptocurrency initiatives that critics noted were convenient given the Trump family's extensive investments in the sector.
None of that was the truly remarkable part.
The remarkable part was what Pulte did with the mortgage records.
The FHFA sits atop an extraordinary repository of private financial data. As the regulator of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, it has access to the mortgage records of millions of Americans — the intimate financial geography of who owns what, how they financed it, and what they said on their loan applications. This is sensitive data, protected under the Privacy Act of 1974, held in trust for a specific regulatory purpose: ensuring the safety and soundness of the housing finance system.
Pulte appears to have decided it was also useful for something else.
Beginning in the spring of 2025, Pulte made a series of criminal referrals to the Department of Justice alleging mortgage fraud. The targets were not random. They were, with a consistency that strains the bounds of coincidence, prominent critics and perceived enemies of Donald Trump: New York Attorney General Letitia James, Senator Adam Schiff, Representative Eric Swalwell, Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis — each of them someone who had, in one capacity or another, held Trump accountable or stood in his way.
Legal analysts were quick to note the problem. The FHFA has no general law-enforcement authority. It has no express authority to make criminal referrals except those granted to its Inspector General under narrow statutory provisions. As one Yale Law School analysis put it plainly, a professor of credit law hypothesized that Pulte "handed Fannie and Freddie a list of political enemies and asked for their loan files for review." A September 2025 letter from Representative Jamie Raskin to Pulte alleged — though this has not been independently confirmed — that Palantir, the data firm with close ties to the administration, provided AI-assisted analysis of the financial records in question.
That same letter from Raskin called it "deep-sea fishing expeditions of Americans' personal financial information" to produce "opposition research reports on officials who have held President Trump accountable."
The Government Accountability Office, responding to Democratic senators, opened an investigation into Pulte's conduct in December 2025. Representative Swalwell filed a separate federal lawsuit alleging Privacy Act violations. The Letitia James prosecution, when it came, was dismissed by a federal judge who found the prosecutor bringing the charges had been unlawfully appointed in the first place.
None of this slowed Pulte down. None of it prompted Trump to reconsider. And now, rather than facing consequences for what critics argue was an unprecedented weaponization of a regulatory agency against political opponents, Pulte is being rewarded with a promotion to one of the most powerful and sensitive positions in the executive branch.
The director of national intelligence was created in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, specifically to coordinate intelligence across agencies that had historically failed to share information. The position oversees the CIA, the NSA, the DIA, and fourteen other agencies. It requires Senate confirmation precisely because the framers of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act understood that concentrating this much institutional power demanded at least some democratic accountability.
Trump is using the acting designation to sidestep that process entirely, installing Pulte without a Senate vote and — in a detail that should alarm anyone paying attention — allowing him to simultaneously retain his role at the FHFA. The man will be running both the housing finance regulator and the nation's spy apparatus at the same time.
Senator Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, was direct in his assessment: "Rather than selecting a respected national security professional capable of delivering independent judgments, the president has chosen an official who has demonstrated not just willingness but eagerness to use the authorities of government to pursue political enemies."
Senator Angus King of Maine was blunter: "By any objective assessment — in terms of experience, expertise, background — this appointment makes no sense."
But it makes sense if you accept the premise that the intelligence community's primary function, under this administration, is not to provide independent analysis to policymakers but to serve as another instrument of political power. Gabbard's tenure made that trajectory visible; Pulte's appointment accelerates it.
There is a through-line here that is worth naming directly.
What Pulte demonstrated at the FHFA was a specific skill: the ability to identify an institution with access to sensitive private data and redirect that access toward the surveillance and prosecution of political opponents. He did it without apparent legal authority, without institutional resistance sufficient to stop him, and without political consequence. The mortgage records of Letitia James and Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell became instruments of executive retaliation.
The intelligence community has rather more extensive files than the FHFA.
The seventeen agencies Pulte is now poised to oversee collect signals intelligence, human intelligence, financial intelligence, and communications data on a scale that makes the FHFA's mortgage repository look quaint. If the same logic that governed Pulte's conduct at the housing agency is applied at the DNI — and there is no institutional mechanism obviously positioned to prevent it — the question of who gets surveilled and who gets referred for prosecution takes on a different magnitude entirely.
That is the appointment announced Tuesday morning on Truth Social, framed as a celebration of Pulte's experience managing mortgage-backed securities.
The intelligence community has a long and troubled history with politicization, from J. Edgar Hoover's maintenance of files on political enemies to the Iraq WMD assessments shaped by administration pressure to the present moment. What distinguishes the current trajectory is the speed and the explicitness. There is no longer much pretense that the goal is independent analysis in service of national security. The goal, Pulte's entire career at the FHFA suggests, is loyalty and utility.
The mortgage records of Letitia James and Adam Schiff were a proof of concept. What Pulte demonstrated at the FHFA was not competence in housing finance — it was a willingness to treat whatever institution he inhabits as a personal instrument of political retribution. Trump has now handed him the largest, most powerful, and most secretive surveillance apparatus in human history. The experiment scales up on Tuesday morning.
Sources:
On Pulte's appointment as acting DNI replacing Gabbard: CNBC — "Pulte appointment as spy chief would give a Trump attack dog access to the 'crown jewels' of intelligence" (June 2, 2026) NBC News — "Housing official who targeted Trump's enemies is named director of intelligence" (June 2, 2026) Time — "Who Is Bill Pulte, Trump's New Acting Director of National Intelligence?" (June 2, 2026) CNN — "Trump names controversial top housing official to be acting director of national intelligence" (June 2, 2026)
On his FHFA tenure, staffing purges, and loyalist appointments: Reuters via Yahoo Finance — "Pulte and other Trump loyalists at mortgage regulator clash with Fannie and Freddie staffers"
On the mortgage fraud referrals and targets: Time (same piece as above) HousingWire — "FHFA's Bill Pulte files new DOJ referrals against Letitia James" (March 26, 2026) CNBC — "Eric Swalwell sues FHFA chief Pulte, alleging director used private information to attack Trump critics" (November 26, 2025) HousingWire — "Eric Swalwell sues FHFA's Bill Pulte over alleged privacy violation" (November 26, 2025)
On the legal questions surrounding FHFA authority: Yale Journal on Regulation — "Are Pulte's 'Mortgage Fraud' Investigations Legal?" by Domenic Powell (November 2025)
On the GAO investigation: CNN Business — "Government Accountability Office launches probe into Bill Pulte over mortgage-fraud referrals" (December 4, 2025)
On the Palantir/opposition research allegation and congressional pushback: Representative Jamie Raskin letter to Pulte, FHFA — September 8, 2025 (via House Judiciary Committee Democrats)
On Warner and King quotes: CNN and CBS News pieces cited above (June 2, 2026)