Impeach Bill Pulte
If we saw a scheme like this playing out in any other context, we'd use every tool available to try and stop it.
Donald Trump’s presidency is failing along every visible dimension.
We can’t see everything going on behind the scenes, and behind the scenes he is orchestrating plans to cheat in and steal the midterm elections. Perhaps those plans are going well—he certainly has allies on the bench who will help him in a pinch. But the things he’s attempting in public are not working as he imagined, and it’s made him catastrophically unpopular. It’s eroded his control over the Republican Senate (and to a lesser extent the House of Representatives) as erstwhile allies turn on him. It’s made even some of his most vile apologists in right-wing media question their allegiances.
In just the past week or so:
Trump claimed for the—sixth? eighth? tenth?—time that a deal to end his failed war in Iran and reopen the Strait of Hormuz was afoot, only for the Iranian government to reject his proposal, cut off communication with U.S. negotiators, and resume bombarding allied Gulf states.
He had to shelve (and most likely abandon) his $1.8 billion insurrection slush fund; in part because Republicans in Congress have signaled they won’t be able to withstand pressure to kill the fund legislatively, and in part because a federal judge cited the “settlement” as evidence that Trump and his administration perpetrated a fraud on her court.
Trump’s plan to hijack America’s 250th birthday collapsed, when musical artists dropped out, suggesting the Trump operation misled them into thinking they’d be participating in a nonpartisan federal commemoration of the founding, rather than a MAGA hate festival.
He also lost his attempt to commandeer the Kennedy Center and saw his persecution of the Broadview Six ICE protesters collapse due to prosecutorial misconduct.
On the one hand: HAHAHA schadenfreude popcorn ya hate to see it.
On the other hand: There’s still five months until the midterms, and 29 months until the presidential election, and when Trump is or feels rejected by anything he tries harder and harder to force himself on that thing. Failing that he tries to destroy it.
This is the context in which you should understand his decision to appoint a man named Bill Pulte to be the nation’s acting spy chief. Pulte is pure filth—a rich real-estate fortune heir who ingratiated himself with Trump well enough to become head of the Federal Housing Finance Administration. Running FHFA is meant to be a boring, somewhat technical administrative job. But Pulte saw it as an opportunity: to rummage through private mortgage application documents associated with Trump’s enemies, so he could cite errors and ambiguities as pretexts for investigations, indictments, or firings. He’s the man behind the failed attempts to prosecute Adam Schiff, and New York Attorney General Tish James, and the on-hold attempt to fire Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve board.
Pulte has no experience in national security or intelligence gathering. His only qualification to be the nation’s spy chief is that he’s pure filth—someone who feels no compunction about abusing state power for whatever serves Trump’s purposes. Trump already enlisted Pulte’s predecessor, Tulsi Gabbard, in election subversion shenanigans in Fulton County, GA. This move is a sign that Trump recognizes his presidency is in shambles, and is thus redoubling his effort to steal the midterms.
But the GOP freak out over the slush fund, and the artist freak out over the Independence Day bait-and-switch, are important indicators. They suggest Trump’s own allies aren’t confident he can pull off big heists anymore. They’re trying to disassociate themselves from his most corrupt schemes. This is why Democrats should seek Pulte’s impeachment and removal.
It may not be necessary. Trump is so toxic that pushback from congressional Republicans might compel him to rescind the appointment.
But Democrats shouldn’t count on it.
They also shouldn’t wait around for Republicans to do the right thing, and they certainly shouldn’t do nothing, assuming it’ll all work out at the ballot box.
Democrats on Capitol Hill, and in aligned DC law firms, are doing a lot of admirable work preparing for Republican election shenanigans. But nearly all of this preparatory work assumes these matters will be settled after the fact in court, or through certification proceedings that are meant to be ministerial.
They are doing very little (at least that I’m aware of) to stop the shenanigans before they’re attempted. I’m thinking in particular here of the decision by Virginia Democrats to fold in the face of evidence that, if called upon, the Virginia Supreme Court’s Republican members will help Trump operationalize a coup d’etat.
I don’t think Democrats should wait until matters are justiciable before running them through court systems that Republicans control. In Virginia, that would mean removing the judges who overturned a voter referendum1 meant to restore midterm fairness.
In Pulte’s case it means not waiting to see what laws he breaks in service of helping Trump rig elections, then filing suit to stop him. It means calling the question now. Pulte should not be the country’s intelligence chief in any capacity, for any amount of time. He is only eligible to serve in that role because he currently serves as a Senate-confirmed official in the Trump administration—an office he has already abused in impeachable ways. Fortunately, there’s a remedy for that.
House Democrats should thus introduce a resolution to impeach Pulte, and force Republicans to vote on it. Under House rules, Republicans could not stop them.
I suspect they will not.
After the administration announced the insurrection trust fund, Democrats ignored public advice to force a vote on impeaching acting Attorney General Todd Blanche.
That problem at least seems to have taken care of itself, and maybe this one will, too. But it’s not as though Democrats have a crystal ball. They didn’t know the slush fund scheme would unravel. And they don’t know that the Pulte appointment will be rescinded. Blanche has put the slush fund on ice, but he’s still on the job, at Trump’s disposal for the next crime. Wouldn’t it be better to address root problems, rather than play Whac-a-mole?
Some have suggested an alternative path: