Bill Pulte is the acting Director of National Intelligence, filling in for Tulsi Gabbard, who left to care for her dying husband. The DNI sits at the hub of every major American intelligence agency — CIA, NSA, the whole apparatus — a post created after 9/11 specifically to ensure the country never again missed the signals it ignored before those attacks. President Trump appointed Pulte to the role temporarily while his permanent nominee, Jay Clayton, awaits Senate confirmation.
This week, Hillary Clinton went on a podcast and said she hoped federal employees would refuse to cooperate with him.
"I mean, I hope there are career and even political appointees, in various of the agencies, that are slow-walking or refusing to share information with Pulte," Clinton said on "Defending Democracy with Marc Elias" — the podcast of Hillary's former fixer, election attorney, Marc Elias.
She also called Pulte "very dangerous" and a "loose cannon."
Clinton framed the appointment as "a naked partisan takeover of the director of national intelligence" and called it "deeply insulting to the intelligence community." Her stated concern is that Pulte lacks intelligence experience — which she argued makes him unfit to access what she herself described as "everything, everything that they want to see."
That experience argument is worth examining. The intelligence community has had plenty of experienced leaders. Some of them presided over the Iraq WMD assessment. Some of them signed a letter calling Hunter Biden's laptop "Russian disinformation" weeks before a presidential election. Experience in the intelligence community is not automatically a credential that inspires public confidence.
Democrats have a more specific concern: that Pulte is a puppet of President Trump who will give in to whatever the president wants. Sen. Mark Warner called him "somebody so grossly unqualified who's shown he's willing to take information and misuse it." That's their argument for the record. It's also an argument for courts, congressional oversight, and formal complaints — not for career employees deciding which presidential appointees deserve cooperation and which ones don't.
That's the larger principle Clinton is endorsing: a permanent bureaucracy that outranks the elected government. Not whistleblowing. Not conscientious objection. Career officials deciding the president's appointee doesn't deserve access to the job the president gave him.
Clinton, of course, has her own complicated relationship with information-sharing. This is the same official who maintained a private email server at her home in Chappaqua while serving as Secretary of State, then deleted 33,000 emails she unilaterally deemed "personal" before investigators could review them. The same official whose staff took hammers to BlackBerry devices and used BleachBit on hard drives under congressional subpoena.
So when Hillary Clinton tells federal workers to refuse to share information with a sitting government official, she's speaking from a place of genuine expertise on the subject.
Federal employees, meanwhile, have legal obligations to comply with information requests from authorized officials. "Slow-walking or refusing" isn't a protected category of workplace conduct. It's a fireable offense, and depending on the information involved, potentially a federal crime.
Clinton framed her comments as protecting institutional integrity. But institutions don't get to pick their bosses. Voters do that. And voters picked the president who appointed Pulte.
The woman who told a Senate committee "what difference, at this point, does it make" about Benghazi is now very concerned about the proper handling of sensitive government information. The difference, apparently, depends entirely on who's asking for it.
