From The Political Scene: Donald Trump’s Dangerous Politicization of America’s Spy Agencies

18:57Bill Pulte:So there's no basis for it whatsoever.

19:01Jeff Stein:Isn't that exactly the problem? I mean, that somebody in there can take what in this case was Russian fake propaganda and release it as something coming out of the American intelligence community, giving it a whole new life and making it look credible. I mean, it's just an unbelievable mess in terms of figuring out what's real and what's fake and spreading lies, basically.

19:25Bill Pulte:You're absolutely right. This report that she put out was picked apart pretty quickly by experts on this subject who noted that the map she put out didn't even have Kiev in the right place. It didn't have this plant. There was a town that she just sort of made up or someone told her about in Ukraine where one of these plants was supposedly located. It doesn't exist. I mean, it was just shredded. But how much of that filters down to the general public? This is not a big concern. And I had a chat with a medical assistant in a doctor's office yesterday, and she knew a little bit about my background.

20:03Bill Pulte:And I asked her, do you follow the news? She says, well, you know, a little bit. She said that reflecting pool thing, you know, I think that's the landing with a lot of respect. That's breaking through. Before we leave, Kelsey Gabbard, by the way, there's one other thing that she dropped on the way out the door. Another phony story about the Wuhan lab and COVID. it. She again cycled as a proven fact that the Wuhan lab manufactured this COVID virus that got out of hand and that Anthony Fauci somehow knowingly, deliberately misreported, skewered intelligence to absolve the Chinese. I mean, it gets kind of complicated, but there's nothing to do with that.

20:48Bill Pulte:The fact is, and fact checkers have delved into this pretty deeply since she did this last week, it's inconclusive. We still don't know what exactly happened in Wuhan because the Chinese have not been transparent about it. But she, you know, passed this off as a fact, and that was another goodbye gift to Donald Trump on the way out the door. So she's just manufacturing falsehoods on the way out the door.

21:15Jeff Stein:So it looks like Tulsi Gabbard has created a playbook for a Trump DNI, Jeff. And that involves essentially dumpster diving in this trove of intelligence across these agencies and looking for opportunities to score political points. Now, she may have run afoul of the president because she doesn't have the same foreign policy views with him, clearly not on the same page when it came to the war in Iran, which he unleashed. Bill Pulte, tell us a little bit about, you know, where you think he might head with the revenge and retribution thing, as you pointed out about rigged elections. He's already shown this remarkable ability to get into the White House from this obscure housing position and, you know, sort of offer himself up as Donald Trump's man of vengeance.

22:05Jeff Stein:What do you think somebody who was more effective than Tulsi Gabbard could do, you know, in this job?

22:11Bill Pulte:Well, she's fired some 40 percent, or she claims to have fired some 40 percent of the staff at ODNI already. And now Pulte, according to reports, has fired six immediate staff and sent 45 staffers home to their parent agencies. And he says, that's it for now. I'd like to know where, you know, how did he decide who should go back to their agency? Who has he brought with him to the ODNI? Because he doesn't know anything about it. There's nothing in his background that would tell us that he would know who to fire and who to keep. One thing I would look for, for example, and go, oh, of course, he could find some raw reporting that said, say, Iran was on the verge of developing a nuclear weapon.

22:59Bill Pulte:They were two weeks away. This is something that Trump has asserted forever. And there's no intelligence we know of that backs up that thing. I mean, they were so many steps away from developing a nuclear weapon, much less one that could be screwed atop a missile, an ICBM, and fired at any length. So it's all a false notion. But he's in big trouble with the Iran war. I would not be surprised if somehow Bill Pulte comes up and waves an intelligence report, waves a piece of paper in front of the cameras and said, we have found the real truth that Iran was right on the verge of developing a nuclear war.

23:39Bill Pulte:Would you be surprised? No. What you're describing, Jeff, is a scenario in which you have an office that has the platform and the capacity to inject nonsense into public life, whether it's bogus allegations about Anthony Fauci or it's about Ukraine or, as you just described, potentially trying to salvage Trump's rationale for the Iran war. And all of this seems as if it just contributes to the overall decline of American confidence in the intelligence community at a time when people already are saying, I don't know what I can trust. I don't know if I can trust the image. Is it by AI? I don't know if I can trust these tweets.

24:21Bill Pulte:Are they bots? So there is a way in which Trump has now ushered the intelligence community into this culture of disbelief, perhaps you can call it, because he has made it utterly unreliable with people like this. Well, you've touched on a really good subject. It's one thing for him to manipulate the heads of national intelligence. It's another thing to discredit the intelligence community in general. Why would he want to do that? He must know at some level that discrediting American intelligence, which he began to do out loud, as you mentioned before, the Helsinki Conference in 2018, in which he took Vladimir Putin's word over U.S.

25:07Bill Pulte:intelligence on Russian interference in the elections. Now, why would he want to do that? I mean, that goes back to this larger question of what kind of relationship does Trump have with Vladimir Putin? Why would he risk U.S. national security in line with what Vladimir Putin's aims are? I mean, that's got to be a chief aim.

25:32Jeff Stein:I was really struck in this new, buzzy new book that everybody's reading this week, the Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan book. There's this remarkable scene on page six of the book in which Donald Trump is deciding who to put in the cabinet. Tulsi Gabbard comes up and Donald Trump literally says, well, what the hell? Let's give it to Tulsi. What harm could she really do? Noting the book does, she was being promoted by Roger Stone. And it's not just the mysterious cult, but, you know, one important thing to note for the listeners in context for this conversation. is that Tulsi Gabbard throughout her career has taken positions like Donald Trump's that were remarkably soft on Vladimir Putin.

26:18Jeff Stein:She made that mysterious trip to Syria in 2017 at the height of the war when Syria was essentially a client state of the Russians. I feel like your point is really well taken here about Gabbard and why the DNI matters to people. Yeah.

26:35Bill Pulte:I mean, the important reporting of the Washington Post and John Swain was that there's no question now because of the evidence that was produced in that story, thousands of emails showing this Hindu guru calling in the place and Tulsi, like a marionette, you know, repeating what he wants her to say. The next question would be, was there any relationship between this Hindu guru and Vladimir Putin, the Russians, the Syrians? I mean, you have to ask, why would a congresswoman who later became Odea, why would she be siding with Bashar al-Assad saying that it was the opposition that threw poison gas at Syrian villagers?

27:23Bill Pulte:when, you know, there was evidence that emerged long before that, in fact, it was the Assad regime. Why would she take Putin's position on election interference? And she was on Russian TV a lot. They loved her in Kremlin. They crowed out loud in the Kremlin. Tulsi's our gal. So I think that's the next question for investigators. What was the relationship, if any? No evidence that there is any. But wouldn't we ask, was there a relationship between this Hindu guy and his businesses, by the way, which we delved into in 2024, his global businesses?

28:01Jeff Stein:I had one more intelligence community question that's also somewhat alarming that's come out of this whole thing, which is this warrantless wiretapping law, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which has just expired. Does this mean we have blind spots around the world at a time when we are, to some extent, in a war with Iran?

28:23Bill Pulte:I think the hawks would say that for sure. I mean, they say this is an irreplaceable tool. There are lots of concerns, and this is why it's been hung up for some time, over its warrantless surveillance. They can listen to Americans. They can get their communications records from Google and so on, from mail servers. So this has sidelined this surveillance tool, which is adherence is an absolute necessity for monitoring terrorist threats and influence operations against America. God help us if there's another terrorist attack. And you look at this absence at the top of someone with any qualifications running ODNI, plus all the cuts in counterterrorism and counterintelligence, including Iran specialists at the FBI.

29:17Bill Pulte:So put those two things together, and it gives me the shivers.

29:22Jeff Stein:Great. Well, this will be another sleepless night. Thanks so much, Jeff. No, seriously, thank you. Thank you so much for being with us and helping decode the intelligence agencies and the debacle at the DNI's office.

29:40Bill Pulte:It's an honor to be on your show. Thank you.

29:43Jeff Stein:The political scene from The New Yorker will be back in just a moment.

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30:33Jeff Stein:So what did you think, Susan? There's no floor here. I mean, you know, I referenced reading the regime change book. And the reason is not just the crazy way in which Tulsi Gabbard was appointed, But both Gabbert and Bill Pulte, in some ways, are these very representative figures of Trump 2.0, right? They're people whose agendas are opaque, who come from nowhere, who never, ever, ever would have had these sensitive national security jobs if it weren't for Donald Trump, who seems to be on a mission to take a sledgehammer to the credibility and good faith of the government of the United States. I was really blown away.

31:13Jeff Stein:We didn't talk about it, but there's this amazing quote from Republican, now unleashed, retiring Republican Senator Tom Tillis, you know, who was asked about Bill Pulte the other day. And he said, well, my guess is based on his past experience, it's just going to be another hot steaming pile of doge shit. But, you know, it seems to me having this conversation with Jeff Stein, who I should say is an old friend of mine, you know, and has always been a really great counselor to me on various matters and how to decode the intelligence community. But I think a pile of steaming pile of doze shit is the best case scenario here, you know, that they're just looking to, you know, kind of cut the federal workforce.

31:54Jeff Stein:When I listen to Jeff, when I read this account of how Pulte got into Donald Trump's favor in the Oval Office by promising to take down Jay Powell, chairman of the Federal Reserve, he actually, Pulte, according to Maggie and Jonathan's reporting, Pulte actually pre-wrote a letter from Donald Trump firing Jay Powell. And Donald Trump was so taken with that, that was one of the ways in which he ingratiated himself with the president of the United States. So this man having the keys to our intelligence community, I think is frankly terrifying in a way that goes beyond potentially firing people.

32:35Bill Pulte:I think that one of the chilling reflections that Jeff leaves us with is the sense that if you go back to the history of the prelude to 9-11 in 2001, at the time what you saw was, to be concise about it, you saw a lot of professional intelligence work and a combination of political valence, and the result was diabolical. symbolical. You had people that were blinding themselves to what was coming. You had ultimately then the run up to the war in Iraq, in which the intelligence community was drawn into the political project of Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz and others. And this is a history, which is now far enough in the past that I think a lot of particularly, you know, younger Americans don't really know some of this.

33:22Bill Pulte:But for all of us who were seared by that history, who I think know what can happen when an intelligence community is either misused or is dysfunctional and ineffective, this should be a blaring alarm for a country that is at risk in a way that it wouldn't be if it had real leadership in these positions.

33:44Jeff Stein:Totally. I mean, as someone who covered those hijackers and the intelligence community's breakdown over it, What happened was the CIA knew that two of the hijackers for the 9-11 plane hijackings, for the plane that went into the Pentagon, two of them the CIA knew had come into the United States and didn't tip off the FBI that they were here. And those two hijackers burrowed into the community in San Diego and then worked with al-Qaeda to plan the planes hijacking. And because these two agencies weren't speaking to each other, the FBI knew about these guys also but didn't know their history before this.

34:26Jeff Stein:And the CIA knew the history but not where they went afterwards when they came into the U.S. You know, these things matter. It was just a tragedy beyond tragedy what happened because of these problems. And then just to sort of recreate them so casually by putting people in who have no idea what they're doing. They're just playing Russian roulette with American security.

34:49Bill Pulte:And I think to pick up on one other thing that Jeff drew our attention to is now looking ahead to the midterm elections. You've already got Donald Trump talking about a rigged election. And this is now going to be the mantra over the course of the next few months. Susan, you know, here he is now in a position to be able to, and your phrase is a great one, go dumpster diving to find whatever he wants across all of these different agencies and to put things out into the informational bloodstream, which has the effect of just undermining people's confidence in the system, diminishing their enthusiasm to participate.

35:26Bill Pulte:All of this ultimately can conspire to really create a political perfect storm. Can it not?

35:31Jeff Stein:Yeah, I mean, absolutely, Evan. And especially because Donald Trump said the mission for Pulte was to look into the rigged elections. He means both backward looking, i.e. to vindicate him from the charge that he is somehow a pawn of the Russians when he was elected to office in 2016, but also in a forward looking sense. And remember that one of the conspiracy theories that is circulated forever by Trump and people like Tulsi Gabbard has to do with somehow some vague, nefarious foreign interference in the 2020 election, which Donald Trump lost and refuses to admit he lost. And that goes back to this crazy conspiracy theory involving Venezuela and Dominion voting machines.

36:15Jeff Stein:And so when I think about what could Polte do, I hadn't thought about Jeff's scenario, which is the, you know, manufacture or produce some kind of proof that Donald Trump wasn't just talking out of his, you know, rear end with his claims about Iran and a nuclear weapon. But what I have thought a lot about is how might they bring in foreign actors into their burgeoning conspiracy theories about the 2026 election. And that's where this enormous, and I can't overstate this, I think, the vastness of the American intelligence collection apparatus, it sees and hears an unbelievable amount of stuff. And it can be deployed in the effort to prove that Democrats are not legitimately winning elections this fall.

37:06Jeff Stein:Or that opponents or critics of Donald Trump are Antifa or whatever else you want to call them, as he pointed out, too, where you could sort of create domestic investigations and enemies. It's just all together. I'm even more appalled than when we started here today. I'm sorry, but it was great to have this conversation. At least we will have our antenna up to watch for false intelligence coming out of there.

37:35Bill Pulte:We will. We will. I have to say, the stories we talked about today are stories that are jaw-dropping. And I hate to say it, but this is the kind of episode that I think you need to bookmark and think about. Let's look back on it in a few months and see how much of this has become part of the news. Great to join you guys today.

37:51Jeff Stein:Thank you very much. Fantastic to be together, as usual.

37:58Jeff Stein:That was an episode from the Political Scene Podcast, a bonus for New Yorker Radio Hour listeners. Thanks for joining us, and we'll be back later this week with more.

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