Trump Made the Dildo Award Guy His Spymaster
Bill Pulte runs U.S. intelligence now. Then get angry.
I sat down with Sasha Ingber — and if you cover the spy world for a living, this is the week your beat goes fully insane. Sasha founded HUMINT (subscribe: sashaingber.substack.com), hosts the International Spy Museum’s SpyCast as its first journalist host, and spent four and a half years as Scripps News’ national security correspondent after stints at NPR, National Geographic and Smithsonian. She’s been inside CIA secure rooms and a Chinese police station hidden above a Manhattan ramen shop. She knows what a Director of National Intelligence is supposed to be. So when Trump handed the job to this guy, I needed her in the chair.
Here’s the situation, stripped of the wire-service politeness.
The job. On Tuesday, Trump named Bill Pulte — his housing finance director, 38, no intelligence background, no security clearance until they rushed him one — acting DNI, replacing Tulsi Gabbard. He keeps the housing gig and the Fannie/Freddie chairmanships and gets the CIA and NSA. Even John Thune choked on it: “We don’t need a weaponized DNI.” Angus King, who was once considered for the post, said the pick “makes no sense” on experience, expertise, or background. When the Republican leader and a guy who wanted the job both flinch, you’re somewhere new.
Why him, really. Trump told you himself. Asked Thursday why Pulte’s the right man, he wandered through Fannie Mae sale prices and then said the quiet part into a hot mic: Pulte “may find out some things about the rigged elections, etc., etc. … I think he wants to do it very much.” There it is. The 2020 lie, still load-bearing, now wired directly into the intelligence community’s plumbing — five months before a midterm Trump knows is slipping. He’s not hiding the reason. He’s advertising it.
What Pulte actually does with power. This is the tell. As housing chief, Pulte mined private mortgage data and fired off criminal referrals against a tidy little lineup: Fed Governor Lisa Cook, NY AG Letitia James, Sen. Adam Schiff, Rep. Eric Swalwell. Notice anything? All Democrats. All people Trump has publicly threatened. He skipped the FHFA’s own inspector general — the people who actually investigate mortgage fraud — and went straight to DOJ, talking directly to the president. Cook’s lawyer Abbe Lowell says Pulte turned a sleepy housing agency into “a weapon to be brandished against President Trump’s political enemies.” The results? James indicted, then the case collapsed when a judge ruled the prosecutor was illegally appointed. A grand jury declined new charges. Twice. Cook’s fight is at the Supreme Court. The man manufactures cases out of paperwork. Now hand him the nation’s secrets and ask him to “find some things.” You already know what he finds.
The nepo-baby part. Let’s be honest about how he got anywhere. Bill Pulte is the grandson of William J. Pulte, the billionaire who built PulteGroup into one of America’s biggest homebuilders. Grandpa died in 2018 and left his “protégé grandson and heir” a “specially-designated multimillion dollar inheritance package” — their own press release’s words. The kid’s actual résumé is a broadcast journalism degree from Northwestern, an aerial photography side hustle, and a Twitter philanthropy act. MAGA calls him “Little Trump.” The money is the qualification. The money is the whole qualification.
And now the part the wires won’t touch. Pulte’s father, developer Mark Pulte, surfaces in Jeffrey Epstein’s own emails — Epstein misspelled it “Pulty,” which is why nobody caught it in a search. According to reporting flagged by journalist Andrew Prokop and outlets like Narativ, Epstein listed the bidders on the 2004 Palm Beach Maison de l’Amitié as “me, Trump, and his friend, the developer.” That’s the famous mansion Trump bought and flipped to a Russian oligarch at a $50 million markup. So the son of a man named in Epstein’s mansion auction now runs American intelligence. That’s the allegation — single-threaded, his father, not him, and worth saying plainly so nobody can wave it away. But it’s there.
The dildo award. Yeah. We have to. December 2023, a Bed Bath & Beyond meme-stock event Pulte co-hosted — grown men convinced a Taylor Swift song held a secret message about saving their worthless shares. They handed Pulte a novelty trophy reading “Bill Pulte F*cks” on one side and “Only the Young” on the other (the Swift title the memestock crowd had nicknamed “Only the Hung”). Real video. Two years ago, not college. “That looks pretty badass,” he said, then dropped it because he “got too excited.” That man receives the President’s Daily Brief now.
So that’s your spy chief, America: a nepo-baby attack dog who weaponizes private data against the president’s enemies, whose dad shows up in Epstein’s inbox, who took a green-dildo trophy at a conspiracy convention — installed expressly to go hunting for a “rigged election” that doesn’t exist.
Sasha and I got into all. Watch the whole thing. Then subscribe to HUMINT at sashaingber.substack.com.
Thank you Amy Gabrielle, Caroline Boudakian, PJ Schuster, Stephanie Munoz, Dannys, and many others for tuning into my live video with Sasha Ingber! Join me for my next live video in the app.
