What the fight over the next intelligence director means for national security

0:05Dennis Blair:It depends on the attitude that he takes when he goes in. Is he going to be a worthy leader of the organization to help do its important job or is he looking to run other agendas against it?

0:15Craig Karmin:President Trump has had to haggle with Congress over many controversial appointments, but his back and forth over picking a new spy chief is becoming one of the messiest yet.

0:34Craig Karmin:It's Wednesday, June 17th, and this is here now, anytime from NPR and WBUR. I'm Chris Bentley.

0:43Craig Karmin:Today on the show, remember the building in D.C. turned into a Trump hotel during the president's first term? This was always the jewel of the Trump's hotel portfolio. and it really became associated with the first term of the president. It became kind of a Republican clubhouse. The Trumps eventually sold their lease on the building owned by the federal government. Now, with Trump back in office, the government has sold the building outright and its buyer looks likely to flip it at a huge profit. More in a few minutes. Also, how an obscure oil company helped Trump slash pollution controls. What matters is not whether a policy makes sense from an energy and a climate perspective.

1:28Craig Karmin:It's if you support the president and if you support the wider project of let's deregulate everything.

1:38Craig Karmin:Fossil fuel influence in Washington, coming up in about 15 minutes. But first, President Trump's plans to find a new director of national intelligence already derailed some legislation in Congress on spy powers. Now Trump wants to use his new pick for the job as leverage to force Congress to pass a bill overhauling American elections. Quick background. Last week, lawmakers withheld support for an extension of warrantless wiretapping powers, known as FISA Section 702, because they said Trump's first pick for acting director of national intelligence, Bill Pulte, might use those tools against political opponents.

2:18Craig Karmin:Trump then put forward a different name, U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton. But this morning, Trump canceled today's confirmation hearing for Clayton and has been haranguing Republicans on social media to pass the SAVE Act first, a bill that would federalize elections and make it harder to vote by mail. Republican Senator John Kennedy described the situation like this on Fox News.

2:42Dennis Blair:Well, at the moment, it's a multiple vehicle pop-up. The president is aggressively unpredictable. We thought we had things worked out. We don't.

2:56Craig Karmin:Those spy powers from FISA are still in limbo. And we wanted to know what a former director of national intelligence thinks of all this. So we asked retired Admiral Dennis Blair, who was DNI under President Obama. He spoke to Scott Tong.

3:12Dennis Blair:So Jay Clayton had been on what appeared a fast-tracked confirmation and start the job as early as this week. Now, it appears Bill Pulte will take up the post as acting director Friday. That's when the outgoing DNI, Tulsi Gabbard, leaves the job. It's moving fast. What do you make of these developments? Well, I look at it from the point of view of the people in the DNI trying to integrate this country's intelligence in order to protect American citizens. And I think this sort of chaotic leadership changes is just bad for protecting Americans. Can you give me an example? That is, if this is politicized, if there's no full-time confirmed director in charge, what do you worry about?

3:58Dennis Blair:Well, let's see. Let me go to the Section 702 article first. This is a fundamental piece of legislation which authorizes the gathering of very important intelligence under some careful rules. Yeah, right. This warrantless wiretapping of foreigners overseas. Well, wiretapping is a sort of a negative. It's gaining access to the communications of people that the intelligence community suspects are doing something against American interests. and the American communications are taken up in that process, then there's a procedure to make sure that their rights are not violated. And this is just a fundamental set of rules that the intelligence community uses to try to balance security versus Americans' right to privacy.

4:43Dennis Blair:And to tie that to political considerations of leadership changes is just hurting the American ability. So that's one thing that's – And let me just kind of pause you, sir. That is, the legal authorization expired and now this has caught up and the Senate has yet to renew it. And so now this is the question. Yeah. Yeah. So that's one thing that sort of results in this chaos. The other one is just the consistency of leadership to improve the intelligence community. You just need a knowledgeable, solid leader with some time on the job in order to make these 18 agencies work better together and to steal things our enemies want to hide from us and to support policy and tactical operations in the field.

5:36Dennis Blair:And that's being hurt by this rapid turnover of largely unqualified people that we're seeing recently. Yeah. Well, Admiral, there is now a – it seems a likely scenario that Bill Pulte, a close friend of the president, will become the acting director of national intelligence. He is the top housing official, has disclosed sensitive information to go after the president's enemies, former FBI director James Comey included for alleged mortgage fraud. If he's in the chair, do you worry he could take the nation's top secrets and somehow politicize them? I can't think of many instances in which knowledge of real estate was something that was important to the decisions I made as DNI.

6:23Dennis Blair:So I don't think his qualifications particularly suit him for the job. I have seen instances in the past in which somebody who is a friend of the president can explain to the president the good things that the organization that he is in charge of are doing and can ease the way for that group to do it – for that organization to do its job. And DNI could certainly use that. So it depends on the attitude that he takes when he goes in. Is he going to be a worthy leader of the organization to help it do its important job? or is he looking to run other agendas against it? Is there a potential here, say, for the head of intelligence to play up certain risks in the world, play down other risks based on what the president wants to hear?

7:10Dennis Blair:The ideal is speaking truth to power, to call in the balls and strikes the way you see them based on what our intelligence gathering shows. And I hope that's what Mr. Pulte will do in such an important job. But it's a case of character and integrity in the leadership. I understand. Admiral Dennis Blair served as director of national intelligence under President Obama. Admiral, thank you. Okay, so long, Scott.

7:43Craig Karmin:If you like going deeper than the headlines and hearing from people at the heart of the stories that matter, click that follow button to keep up with here and now anytime we've got something new and worth listening to every single weekday of the year if you're already following here and now anytime it'd be huge if you left us a nice review on apple podcasts or wherever you're listening to this show ratings help us reach new people and we really appreciate it we're going to take a short break now and when we come back indira lakshmanan has the story of a fancy hotel in washington once owned by the public, that's making a lot of money for a few private people.

8:26Craig Karmin:Well, the Trump administration has quietly sold a historic government property with a view of Capitol Hill, the old post office building on Pennsylvania Avenue. During President Trump's first term, his family leased the property from the government and converted it into a luxury hotel. That building was owned by taxpayers, but the Trump administration sold the building this month for$80 million to a merchant bank. The Wall Street Journal reports the bank may now sell the property, and the Trump family had expressed interest in buying it. Here to explain is Craig Carman, Real Estate Bureau Chief for The Wall Street Journal, who broke the story.

9:04Craig Karmin:Welcome, Craig. Thanks for having me. So the old post office building was built in the late 1800s. It's famous for its iconic clock tower. It has a fantastic position right there on Pennsylvania Avenue between the White House and the Capitol. It's been operating under a lease agreement for almost a century and most recently has been a hotel. Is the executive branch allowed to just sell historic buildings like this? It doesn't have to go through Congress? Well, a lot of the buildings that are owned by the General Services Administration, the GSA, have been put up for sale since the second Trump administration.

9:42Craig Karmin:I think it started under Doge when they said we wanted to be a more efficient government. And one thing we're going to do is get out of the real estate ownership business. They've been selling office buildings and other buildings. And at one point, they put the old post office building on the list, currently being run as a Waldorf Astoria hotel. So the Trump family operated this property as a hotel during his first term, but they sold their rights to that lease in 2022. They had faced criticisms and lawsuits over potential conflicts of interest. Remind us, what were those lawsuits and what happened to them?

10:19Craig Karmin:Yeah, so there's a foreign emoluments clause that says you can't make money from your office. And the Trumps were renting out a hotel that the family real estate company was operating. And some of the Democrats were saying that they were in violation of those rules. The Trumps had said that we didn't market it to foreign dignitaries and that any money that was spent by government officials, foreign government officials, would go to the Treasury. And I think in the end, after they sold the long-term lease on the property and Trump was out of the White House in those four years in between his two terms, the lawsuits basically went away.

10:55Craig Karmin:Right. The Supreme Court dismissed that litigation shortly after Biden took office saying that the issue had become moot. All right. You report, Craig, that the bank that owns the property now, BDT and MSD, which had a lease on the historic post office before, they bought it for only$80 million, but they're talking about selling it again for much more close to$400 million. Is it normal for a property like this to be sold at one price and resold so soon after for five times the price? Explain to us why they didn't just pay full price of$400 million if that's the market value. Sure. This is a rather complicated transaction because the property was not initially sold to MSD.

11:43Craig Karmin:They bought the lease rights to it for close to a century. In effect, they had control of the property and they paid rent to the U.S. government for that control. So what they wanted to do was to basically buy out the government's ability to charge rent. But they already had the right to operate the hotel. All that was missing was that they needed to get the ground beneath the hotel and get out of their regular lease payments. But the bulk of the value in the property was by owning that long-term lease. I see. and they had bought it when and for how much? Well, the previous, this Miami investment firm bought it from the Trumps, the rights to the lease from the Trumps for$375 million.

12:29Craig Karmin:They ended up defaulting on a loan and the lender, BDT MSD, then took control of the property. You reported exclusively back in January, 2025 that one of the president's sons, Eric Trump, was in talks with this same bank at Mar-a-Lago expressing interest in buying the old post office property. So will the Trump family now buy this building that they once operated as a hotel? Well, that is the$400 million question. I don't know if their interest today is as strong as it was last year. I suspect they're still interested in it. Now that the building is owned outright and the ground beneath it, the ground lease are combined with the building, it's a much cleaner transaction.

13:15Craig Karmin:They don't have to worry about paying rent. Whatever new buyer wouldn't have to worry about paying rent. And remember, this was always the jewel of Trump's hotel portfolio. They beat out Marriott and Hilton when they won the rights to lease the building and turn it into a Trump hotel. And it really became associated with the first term of the president. It became kind of a Republican clubhouse. Anyone who had business before the president liked to hang out there. And I was told when the president met people in the morning, one of his first questions was, if they were from out of town, where did you stay last night?

13:51Craig Karmin:You really only had one answer that would be acceptable. Craig Carman is Real Estate Bureau Chief for The Wall Street Journal. He wrote exclusively about the government selling the historic old post office building. Thank you so much, Craig, for joining us. Thanks for having me.

14:12Craig Karmin:coming up a story of oil influence in the white house how an obscure fossil fuel company employing what one analyst called the dung beetle business model got the ear of president trump and a very powerful seat at the table to help slash climate regulations stick around

14:42Craig Karmin:A major climate polluter might get a break from the Environmental Protection Agency after its founder gave millions to Trump's campaign. Oil tycoon Jeffrey Hildebrand owns Hillcorp. The company buys up stripper wells that produce little oil and gas, but belch lots of planet-warming methane. That business model was threatened by Biden-era plans to regulate methane, What Hildebrand did next is a story of environmental rollbacks and fossil fuel influence in the Trump administration. Alex Quadros tells that story in a new investigation for ProPublica. And he told Scott Tong, Hillcorp is not a well-known company, but it is hugely profitable.

15:25Craig Karmin:Its business is to buy up old, leaky, low-producing wells that the big publicly traded companies no longer want. And these wells are known as stripper wells. And while each well doesn't produce very much oil or natural gas, if you have a lot of them and you keep your costs down, you can turn quite a nice profit on these. And the guy who founded the company, still owns it, is a guy named Jeff Hildebrand. And he's also definitely not a household name. But he's a billionaire worth around$15 billion, according to Bloomberg.

16:04Dennis Blair:Yeah, and I want to ask you more in a bit about Hildebrand. But first of all, these stripper wells, what do we know about methane leaks from these wells? And let's just note methane is a greenhouse gas.

16:18Craig Karmin:Absolutely. These stripper wells, even though they only contribute 6 % of the nation's oil and natural gas, account for around 50 % of the methane emissions from all oil and gas production.

16:33Dennis Blair:outsize, I don't know, kind of impact on the planet here.

16:38Craig Karmin:Yeah, it's shocking. And, you know, I spoke to one climate advocate who, you know, said this was your rare case in terms of global warming solutions of low-hanging fruit, because it's not such a huge sacrifice to get rid of 6 % of your production and also get rid of 50 % of your methane emissions.

17:00Dennis Blair:And you report, Alex, as far as this company, Hillcorp, you report that the company plays fast and loose with environmental rules. What do you mean?

17:10Craig Karmin:The most egregious example I found was a case in 2016 when a natural gas pipeline owned by Hillcorp just offshore Alaska in the Cook Inlet ruptured and actually spewed methane for four months until it was finally repaired. I spoke to one expert who called this the dung beetle model. This is actually a really common model. In the oil industry, there are a lot of little companies who buy up these old low-producing wells and just spend as little as possible on environmental compliance.

17:47Dennis Blair:Right. If you have lower cost, these companies also didn't pay to drill these wells, right? That's the business model, I guess, trying to make it as low-cost as possible. So let me ask about then government oversight. The Biden administration had moved to charge companies, charge polluters for any methane emissions. Then President Trump came into a second term and I gather got Congress to walk away from some of that. Is that right? Yeah.

18:14Craig Karmin:I mean I was shocked in reporting this story to learn that until the Biden administration, there were basically no federal rules on methane pollution from stripper wells. Those rules did not last long. Once the Trump administration came in in 2025, this was high on their list. And one of the first things that Lee Zeldin, the EPA administrator, announced as part of their deregulatory campaign was unraveling these methane rules. And that is something that they're hard at work on at the moment. And my reporting shows that part of this is to significantly water down the restrictions on these stripper wells that, again, contribute very little energy but a lot of methane.

19:02Dennis Blair:Which brings us back to this company, Hillcorp. The founder, Jeffrey Hildebrand, as you report, historically has not been a big political contributor, but he put in a lot of money into the Trump campaign in the 2024 election. And now a former lobbyist for the company, according to your article, is in a top position at the EPA. What have you learned about the EPA and its links to industry on this regulatory question of methane? Yeah, so a former Hillcorp lobbyist, a guy named Aaron Szabo, was appointed to lead the office at the EPA that is in charge of climate regulations.

19:41Craig Karmin:And he had not only been a lobbyist for Hillcorp, also other oil and gas companies. And actually, something I turned up in my reporting was that he had helped to draft an industry argument against the Biden methane rules when he was a lobbyist. And he is now in charge of revising those methane rules. Zabo, this former Hillcorp lobbyist, has been seeking input from oil and gas companies, including trade groups that Hillcorp and Hildebrand are members of and have controlling roles in. I saw incredible emails, instances where members of oil industry trade groups are saying, thanks for asking us for input.

20:24Craig Karmin:Here's the suggested language that we would like to see when this rule is rewritten. And one aspect in particular that seems likely to go through, the oil industry groups that Hildebrand is a part of have been asking to exempt stripper wells from the methane rules entirely. I've reported on some of these issues in the past, and these industry groups consistently have argued, you know, we deserve a seat at the table.

20:54Dennis Blair:I mean, is that what they say in this case?