President Trump called on Friday for his choice to temporarily run the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to conduct mass firings of employees who “shouldn’t be there.”
Mr. Trump, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, also said his pick, Bill Pulte, would be “less shackled” by the constraints of being the president’s choice to lead the agency permanently.
“It sort of gives you more power, you know, for a somewhat limited period of time,” Mr. Trump added.
The comments are the most expansive that Mr. Trump has made about Mr. Pulte, who runs a lesser-known agency, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, and has no known national security experience. Mr. Trump on Monday announced Mr. Pulte as his choice to replace Tulsi Gabbard as the director of national intelligence.
Mr. Trump has said that Mr. Pulte will not be nominated for confirmation by the Senate to lead the agency permanently. Since Mr. Pulte has been Senate-confirmed previously for his current role, he can serve in the new position for 210 days.
But Mr. Pulte, a loyal attack dog on behalf of Mr. Trump, has spent more than a year identifying what he has called crimes committed by people the president views as his political enemies. Those people have either investigated Mr. Trump or been part of institutions, like the Federal Reserve, that the president has maintained are operating with political motives against him.
Mr. Pulte did not respond to a request for comment.
“I’d like to see it smaller. I think there are a lot of people in there that shouldn’t be there,” Mr. Trump told The Journal.
That has alarmed several Republican senators, who have said they worry about the office that oversees the intelligence community being used as a weapon. And the comments from the president are unlikely to assuage the concerns of those lawmakers, who are debating whether to reauthorize a controversial section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that allows the government to monitor U.S. citizens abroad without a warrant.
Mr. Trump has long been deeply skeptical of the intelligence community, primarily because of the investigation into whether his 2016 campaign conspired with Russians who, officials have repeatedly said, interfered in the presidential election that year to harm Mr. Trump’s rival, Hillary Clinton.
According to The Journal, the president mentioned people who had worked for the past two Democratic presidents and are still part of federal intelligence agencies as employees who should be fired.
He said Mr. Pulte should “start the process” of firing employees and slimming down the office.
“Frankly, it might be good for him to shake it up before people come,” Mr. Trump said, according to the newspaper, referring to a potential nominee to run the office permanently. If Mr. Pulte could slim down the office, together with the president and whoever succeeds Mr. Pulte, “he can do a lot of the hard work and we wouldn’t have to saddle somebody that goes in,” Mr. Trump said.
The president said a day earlier that the 2020 election, which he has repeatedly claimed he actually won despite his own government that year saying there was no widespread fraud affecting the outcome, is a topic he wants Mr. Pulte to focus on.
Ms. Gabbard was far from a favorite of establishment Republicans on Capitol Hill. But she was a former House member who served in the National Guard, a record that was more familiar to senators than that of Mr. Pulte, an heir to a housing fortune who has frequently sold himself to the president as the person to carry out Mr. Trump’s wishes, according to White House officials.
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