A Real-Estate Executive Just Got the Keys to the FBI's Intelligence Files.
Bill Pulte, the man behind sixteen months of criminal referrals against Trump's enemies, is now the acting Director of National Intelligence.
This is “What I’m Hearing” — a somewhat daily guide to the stories that matter, drawn from the best pro-democracy political writers working right now, with my analysis on top.
The Spy Who Served Only Him.
On Tuesday, Donald Trump named Bill Pulte the acting Director of National Intelligence. Pulte will sit atop the 18 U.S. intelligence agencies and set the priorities for what those agencies investigate, whom they target, and what the President is told about the world. Donald Trump has appointed some seriously unqualified people to his cabinet. Pulte might be the worst yet.
Pulte’s qualifications for this job, per his FHFA biography, are in real estate and philanthropy. He has no background in intelligence, foreign policy, or national security. He will also keep his existing job running the Federal Housing Finance Agency and chairing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, because apparently overseeing $10 trillion in mortgage assets and the entire U.S. intelligence community is something one man can do as a side hustle.
When Congress created the DNI position after 9/11, it required by statute that anyone in the job have “extensive national security expertise.” Sen. Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, has already flagged that the appointment plainly violates that statute. And Pulte’s actual job at the FHFA over the last sixteen months has been to use the housing-finance machinery to investigate Trump’s political enemies. As CBS News documents, Pulte has sent criminal referrals to the Justice Department alleging mortgage fraud against New York Attorney General Letitia James, Sen. Adam Schiff, Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, and former Rep. Eric Swalwell — all of them perceived Trump adversaries, all of them denying wrongdoing, and only one of those referrals resulting in actual charges, which were eventually dismissed. The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office is currently investigating whether Pulte “potentially misused federal authority and resources” to attack Trump’s enemies. The GAO’s findings are expected late this year or early next year, by which point Pulte will already be running the intelligence community.
Pulte is so unqualified that even Republicans are sounding the alarm. Sen. John Thune — the Republican Majority Leader — told reporters on the Hill: “We don’t need a weaponized DNI, we need professionals there.”
Robert Hubbell called Pulte “a political hack” now installed as “the nation’s chief intelligence officer.” Brian Beutler at Off Message had already, before this week’s news, made the case that Pulte should be impeached for what he was doing at FHFA. Beutler’s argument is that the housing-finance machinery, the slush fund, and the election infrastructure are the same project, run by the same people, aimed at the same goal. The DNI elevation makes that case immeasurably stronger.
In May, Trump fired Tulsi Gabbard over her warning that the Iran war could go nuclear. The replacement candidate was the deputy DNI, Aaron Lukas, a career intelligence professional. Trump skipped him. Instead, the man who has spent the last year building criminal cases against Trump’s political opponents from inside a housing agency now has the keys to the FBI’s intelligence files, the NSA’s surveillance apparatus, and the President’s Daily Brief. Pulte’s job will not be to keep Americans safe. It will be to use the full force of America’s spying apparatus to investigate Trump’s enemies and interfere in our election.
The only good news is that Pulte appears to be incompetent. Rooting for the incompetence of the nation's chief intelligence officer is not where any of us should be in 2026.
Read more: Letters from an American (Hubbell), Off Message (Beutler), Time, CBS News.
They Murdered 60 Minutes.
A few hours after a Bulwark Triad column called Scott Pelley “the hero we need,” CBS News fired him.
The official letter to Pelley, from newly installed 60 Minutes executive producer Nick Bilton, said his “antipathy to the future of the show has come through loud and clear” and that his employment was terminated “for cause, effective immediately.” The unofficial version is on the record in Pelley’s own statement, reported by HuffPost and The Hill and confirmed by NBC News: “For my part, new management has instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story. I’ve been told to include assertions that are unverified. To date, in every case, I have managed to ignore these instructions or refuse them.” Pelley added that the “collapse of values at the top” had “become untenable” and that the new ownership was casting the show aside “to curry a moment of favor with the Trump administration.”
To which the new ownership at Paramount Skydance, run by tech scion nepo baby David Ellison, with Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief and Bilton (a former NYT tech columnist with no broadcast-news experience) as the new EP — responded by firing him the next day for cause. Robert Reich gave Pelley his weekly Joseph N. Welch Award and called the piece “The Murder of ‘60 Minutes.’” That was written before the firing made the title literal.
This is the latest chapter in the corporate capitulation to Donald Trump. Trump sued CBS in 2024 over the network’s interview with Kamala Harris, on a legal theory that most experts considered frivolous. Paramount’s previous ownership settled it in July 2025 for an eight-figure sum, days before the Trump FCC approved Paramount’s $8 billion merger with Skydance. Then, in October, Bari Weiss was installed as CBS News editor-in-chief. In May, Weiss spiked a finished 60 Minutes segment on the Trump administration’s CECOT deportations hours before it was set to air. Executive producer Tanya Simon was replaced. Correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega left or were fired. Bilton replaced Simon. And now Pelley — who called out Weiss and Bilton — is gone too.
The public story is that Bari Weiss was hired to recruit younger viewers and breathe life into a stale newsroom. Six months in, we have the results. CBS Evening News has shed 23% of its total audience and 15% in the 25-54 demo — the exact viewers she was supposedly hired to recruit. April 2026 was the lowest-ever month for CBS Evening News in the 25-54 demographic in the program’s history. Meanwhile, 60 Minutes just closed its 52nd consecutive season as America’s #1 news program, averaging 9.1 million viewers, up 9% from last year. The show she’s dismantling was growing. The one she rebuilt is in free fall. If her job were really about ratings, she would have been fired in April.
So why is she still in charge? Larry and David Ellison just spent $8 billion to acquire Paramount and are about to spend $81 billion to acquire Warner Bros., which owns CNN. Weiss’ job was to make sure that nothing at CBS News hurt Larry and David Ellison’s takeover of Paramount and now Warner Bros. Her job is to spike stories unfavorable to the administration and show Trump that under the Ellisons’ control, CBS News won’t be an issue.
Bari Weiss is succeeding at exactly the job she was actually hired to do. If the Ellisons close the Warner deal, Weiss isn't getting fired. She's getting promoted to do this at CNN next.
Read more: Robert Reich, The Bulwark (Triad), NBC News, HuffPost.
Everyone Is Resigning. The Slush Fund Is Dead. Trump Is Still Immune.
Underneath the spectacle of the week is the quieter, harder story: the people who execute Trump’s agenda are walking out. Robert Hubbell catalogs the exits. Per the New York Times, more than 10,000 federal lawyers have left the administration, leaving entire agencies understaffed; the administration has replaced them with about 3,000 mostly junior, party-credentialed attorneys. Treasury general counsel Brian Morrissey, a former Sidley Austin partner, resigned the day Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced the $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund. The lead federal prosecutor in the Comey “seashell” case withdrew, per The Guardian, abandoning the prosecution mid-stream. House Republicans, per Semafor, fled Washington before the Memorial Day recess rather than vote on amendments tied to the slush fund and the Iran War Powers Resolution.
And on Tuesday, the slush fund itself died. Blanche, testifying before a House Appropriations subcommittee, told Rep. Grace Meng: “We are not moving forward with the fund. Period.” Senate Majority Leader John Thune and roughly half the Republican conference had told the administration they would not pass the underlying $72 billion legislative package unless the fund was killed in writing. So Blanche killed it.
Read the quote carefully, though. Blanche killed the fund. He didn’t undo the settlement that created it. The “FOREVER BARRED” addendum granting Trump and his family permanent immunity from IRS audits is still in effect. “Nothing has changed” on the immunity, Blanche told the same hearing. Rep. Rosa DeLauro put it cleanly: “you’ve taken one piece... but as part of the settlement, which is this immunity for the President and his family and his business, etc. that stands.” The fund is dead. The personal tax pardon survives. And meanwhile, the trademark filings for “Trump 250” are still active, the Freedom 250 sponsor price list still runs $500,000 to $10 million, and most of the musical acts originally booked for Trump’s Fourth of July spectacle on the National Mall have backed out, prompting Trump to post on Truth Social: “Cancel it… We should have a giant MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN RALLY, for 250, instead of having overpriced singers… whose music is boring.” He then floated himself as the headliner, calling himself “the Number One Attraction anywhere in the World.”
The temptation right now is to read the week as a string of Trump losses and call it a turning. The fund died. The party collapsed. Republican senators broke. Ten thousand lawyers quit. And those are all real. But notice what didn’t break. The immunity addendum stayed. The DOJ is now running on roughly a third of its prior legal staff, staffed instead by political hires loyal to the man making the rules. The intelligence community was just handed to Bill Pulte. The president’s family is still on track to clear $11.6 billion in crypto wealth and roughly $20 billion in inheritance from a tax-immunity deal that, by the administration’s own admission today, is still alive. Trump is genuinely losing on the things that make for embarrassing news cycles. He is still winning on the things that compound.
Read more: Robert Hubbell, The Bulwark — Fyre 250, Robert Reich on Trump 250, Time on the slush fund, The Hill.
That’s your Wednesday. Trump handed America’s spy agencies to a real-estate executive. CBS fired Scott Pelley. The slush fund died, but Trump’s personal tax immunity didn’t.