US President Donald Trump’s nominee to serve as the nation’s top intelligence official, Jay Clayton, evaded directly stating that Trump lost the 2020 election. During his Senate confirmation hearing Clayton said only that Biden had been ‘certified’ as president, adding ‘I am not an election denier’.
Published On 16 Jul 202616 Jul 2026
Share
WASHINGTON — President Trump’s pick to head the nation’s intelligence agencies struggled to win Democratic support in a contentious confirmation hearing Wednesday where he clashed repeatedly with them over the 2020 election.
Democrats asked Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York and a former Securities and Exchange Commission chairman, over and over again whether former President Biden won the election and defeated Trump. Echoing many of Trump’s nominees, Clayton said many times that the election was “certified” for Biden, declining to say outright that the Democrat won.
“I’m not going to get into this with you,” Clayton told Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff, the last of several Democrats on the committee to grill Clayton on the 2020 election. Clayton appeared frustrated and flustered as Ossoff repeated the question several times. “I’ve answered it,” he said.
Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, who had praised Clayton’s nomination when Trump picked him for the role last month, expressed exasperation with him at the end of the hearing. Democrats say they are concerned that Trump will try to direct intelligence agencies to influence U.S. elections as the president has repeated his false claims that the 2020 contest was stolen.
“I’ve known Mr. Clayton for some time, I worked with him closely when he was at the SEC,” said Warner, the top Democrat on the intelligence panel. “But I am bitterly disappointed.”
While Clayton has broad support among Republicans, the acrimony with Democrats could be a blow to GOP leaders who had hoped to gain their consent for a quick vote to replace temporary intelligence director Bill Pulte, a former housing official with no known intelligence experience and who used his previous administration perch to target perceived adversaries of the president.
Senators in both parties have criticized Pulte, and Republicans had hoped to confirm Clayton immediately after he was nominated in June so Pulte did not take over when Gabbard left office. But Trump delayed Clayton’s nomination, allowing Pulte to take the job temporarily.
Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Tom Cotton, R-Ark., said the committee will vote on Clayton’s nomination next week.
Clayton did not mention Pulte in the hearing. But he emphasized his own government and national security experience, attempting to assuage senators in both parties.
“I saw firsthand how a strong national security apparatus depends on decisive judgment, discipline, integrity, and effective communication and cooperation across different branches of the government,” Clayton said in his opening statement. “If confirmed as Director of National Intelligence, I will commit to upholding these principles every day.”
Cotton expressed frustration last month when the hearing was delayed. He said in his opening statement Wednesday that Clayton has a reputation for operating with “morality, decency and integrity” in his previous positions and that he hopes his nomination will win bipartisan support.
Democrats also pressed Clayton on former National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard’s visit to a Georgia election office earlier this year during an FBI search related to the 2020 election. Trump administration officials have given varying explanations for Gabbard’s involvement in the search, which appeared to be outside of her intelligence role.
Clayton declined to say whether Gabbard’s visit was appropriate or how he would handle the same situation. At one point he said he wasn’t aware of Gabbard’s visit before this week, then later appeared to backtrack, saying “it wasn’t something on my mind” before he started to prepare for the hearing.
Warner said it “strains credibility” that Clayton wasn’t aware of Gabbard’s election activities.
Democrats also asked Clayton about Trump’s announcement that he will deliver a primetime address on Thursday with a focus on elections, after the president suggested he could revisit long-debunked conspiracy theories about his 2020 defeat. Clayton said he had has no involvement with that speech.
Clayton is currently the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, one of the most prestigious of the Justice Department’s prosecution offices. His cases have ranged from terrorism and espionage cases to security fraud and public corruption.
Democrats pressed Clayton on subpoenas of four New York Times journalists after they reported on security concerns involving the new, Qatari-gifted Air Force One. The Committee to Protect Journalists has called the subpoenas “an extraordinary escalation in President Trump’s efforts to threaten and intimidate independent news organizations and have a chilling effect on the work of journalists across the country.”
Clayton said he was not able to discuss the details of the subpoenas and declined to elaborate on whether he spoke to the White House before they were issued. He said he is “confident in procedures we have in place to protect freedom of press.”
Under Clayton, the office also facilitated the unsealing of thousands of pages of court records from the prosecutions of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell — documents that were made public as part of the Justice Department’s release of records related to the late sex offender and his longtime confidant.
Clayton has also overseen the prosecution of former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and Maduro’s wife, Cilia Flores, on drug trafficking charges.
Clayton’s confirmation could potentially clear the way for bipartisan legislation to renew Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, which stalled last month when Democrats had said they would not provide the necessary votes to pass the bill unless Pulte’s temporary appointment was withdrawn.
The law, which aims to prevent terrorist attacks by monitoring the communications of targeted foreigners located outside the United States, expired in June.
Even if Democrats relent, it is unclear if Trump would sign the bill. He said in his June social media post delaying Clayton’s nomination that he would not sign the FISA renewal without his legislation to require proof of citizenship for all voters. The voting bill does not have enough support to pass the Senate.
Jalonick writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Eric Tucker contributed to this report.
Japan is setting up its first centralised intelligence agency since World War II to try to modernise its defence capabilities against spies, foreign interference and other attacks from foreign adversaries.
Legislation to establish the new agency passed the upper house of Japan’s National Diet in May, a month after it cleared the lower house.
After decades of relying on US intelligence support and after a pacifist stance was enshrined in the Japanese Constitution, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi described this law as “a first step” towards strengthening the country’s espionage capabilities.
The legislation creates two bodies: a National Intelligence Council that will act as the government’s command centre for intelligence gathering and analysis and an agency for operations. The reform changes the existing Cabinet Intelligence and Research Office (CIRO) into a centralised National Intelligence Council and National Intelligence Bureau.
Takaichi isn’t exactly building the US Central Intelligence Agency, but The New York Times reported Western allies, including the United States, Germany and Australia, are advising the Japanese government on establishing the new spy agency.
Ken Kotani, professor at Nihon University, said he believes Japan’s new National Intelligence Council and national intelligence agency model will be original to Japan.
Sanshiro Hosaka, a research fellow at the Estonia-based International Centre for Defence and Security, said the reform is aimed at improving the Japanese government’s intelligence abilities “by strengthening coordination, reducing interagency barriers and ensuring that intelligence products better meet policymakers’ requirements”.
Tokyo says it is facing threats from a number of nearby countries such as North Korea, Russia and China, and a national intelligence agency is needed to counter their efforts.
Kotani explained that Japan’s foreign and national security policy followed the US during the Cold War period. But he noted that “recently Japan has gradually pursued her own policy, especially in the Trump administration period.”
US President Donald Trump has repeatedly accused Washington’s allies of not spending enough on their own defence and on relying on American help. He has questioned US alliances and has been ambivalent about whether the world’s most powerful military would come to the defence of smaller nations.
That, Kotani said, is why “Japan needs to collect intelligence by herself.”
Japan currently lacks an antiespionage law that would make it relatively easy for foreign intelligence activities to go unpunished.
Hosaka explained that former Russian intelligence officers who operated in Japan, such as Stanislav Levchenko and Konstantin Preobrazhensky, described Japan as a paradise for spies: “During the Cold War, Soviet intelligence targeted Japanese technologies, industrial and commercial information as well as the US bases in Japan,” Hosaka explained. “As a major US ally in Asia and an advanced technological economy, Japan remains an important intelligence target for China, Russia, North Korea and others.”
Hosaka said what Japan needs “is a foreign-influence transparency law to increase the transparency of foreign actors’ lobbying activities as well as to deter illegal foreign interference. And an antiespionage law to conduct undercover operations and investigations using assumed identities.”
A major obstacle within Japan’s current decentralised structure, experts said, is that no one has the authority to force cooperation from other agencies or bodies or prevent intelligence data from being scattered.
Kotani explained that the political power of Japan’s current intelligence agency has been weak: “This was because the CIRO was not given any legal mandates on intelligence when it was established in 1952.”
Another difficulty is that under current Japanese laws, foreign representatives suspected of potential intelligence affiliations or interference are difficult to intercept because legal grounds are weak for Japanese authorities to intercept their communications or prosecute them.
Takaichi took office in October and has accelerated the expansion of Japan’s military and security ambitions through a number of measures, including establishing a central intelligence body.
In December, the cabinet approved its largest defence budget ever at $58bn as the Ministry of Defence said it needed to accelerate its “transformation” and would use more than $600m for building a so-called drone and laser shield to protect its southwestern region.
In April, Takaichi’s cabinet moved closer to abolishing a longstanding ban on the export of lethal weapons, such as tanks and warships.
The new direction led to antiwar protests in the streets of Japan in May. However, a Jiji opinion poll in April showed only 19 percent were opposed to the new bill to reform intelligence within the country. About 40 percent were indifferent, and the rest were in favour.
Kotani said he has noticed a lot of the old “taboo has gone” around this subject and it is no longer a topic of concern to many Japanese, He said: “Especially younger generations are not interested in such an old story.”
Japan’s defeat in World War II left its citizens with distrust towards state surveillance as the wartime Special Higher Police, known as the Tokko, monitored, arrested and tortured citizens for their political beliefs.
Article 9 in its constitution, drafted in 1947 shortly after the end of the war, renounced war, and Japan has never had its own foreign intelligence service. Instead, it relied on the US.
The efforts for a new security agency have sparked some domestic criticism, but Hosaka said the latest reforms do not amount to a return to the kind of espionage apparatus that could be used against Japanese civilians.
“The legislation does not itself create significant new intelligence collection or counterintelligence powers,” Hosaka said.
WASHINGTON — Shortly before President Trump ended a ceasefire with Iran this week, Israeli officials presented his team with intelligence indicating Tehran was hatching new plots to kill him.
It was not the first such warning. U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies have tracked evidence for years of Iranian efforts to target the president, with signals only increasing since the start of the war.
Their desire to target Trump and his top aides began six years ago, just outside Baghdad International Airport, when the president ordered a drone strike that killed Iran’s most powerful general. The assassination of Qassem Suleimani brought the two countries to the brink of war.
Yet even as full-scale war was averted, top Iranian officials vowed revenge for the strike, authorizing attempts on the lives not just of the president, but of his secretary of State and national security advisor, among others, even after they had left office.
Now, calls for revenge have reached a sharper pitch in Tehran, after a joint U.S.-Israeli operation killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, at the start of the war in February.
At Khamenei’s funeral ceremonies this week, red flags of vengeance flew throughout the capital as protesters explicitly called on their government to “kill Trump.” His son, Mojtaba, the new supreme leader, was absent from the commemorations, fearing assassination himself.
Mourners hold an anti-President Trump banner at the Imam Khomeini Grand Mosque during mass funeral prayers for Iran’s late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his family in Tehran on Sunday.
(Morteza Nikoubazl / NurPhoto via Getty Images)
The prospect of foreign assassination plots targeting U.S. leaders puts the United States in dangerous new territory, where its embrace of political killings could ultimately place its own officials at unprecedented risk. And experts fear the existential threat of assassination has pushed peace further out of reach: When both sides believe their survival is at stake, the trust required for diplomacy becomes far harder to achieve.
Israeli news organizations have reported that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, cited Iranian attempts to kill Trump in recent years as part of his case to go to war in the first place.
A U.S. official told The Times that a range of serious threats exist against the president, including from Iran, but that Israel’s intelligence pointed to a more specific plot. The official did not provide further details. Israeli officials did not respond to requests for comment.
Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, has said in recent months that the government sees vengeance against U.S. officials as “its legitimate duty and right,” and “will fulfill this great responsibility and duty with all its might.”
“The Suleimani killing accelerated a lifting of restraints on foreign assassinations — and the taboo on targeting and killing foreign leaders, with U.S. military assets, has been more or less lifted,” said Matt Dallek, a political professor at George Washington University.
“If the United States sets the example of how to conduct international relations, and it is using assassination of foreign leaders as a political weapon, it’s only logical that other countries will be more inclined to also engage in assassinations,” Dallek added. “It does seem likely that Trump will have a bigger target on his back.”
Returning from a NATO summit in Turkey on Wednesday, Trump was forced to switch back to an old model of Air Force One — equipped with specialized defensive technologies — from a new plane given as a gift by Qatar, after the Secret Service warned of potential threats to the aircraft from Iran.
“They want to take out the U.S. leader — me,” Trump told reporters aboard the plane. “I’m on whatever list. I saw this morning I’m on every single one of their lists. And so far, I guess I’ve been a bit lucky, but maybe that doesn’t last very long.”
The threat has remained on his mind in the days since. In an interview with the New York Post, Trump told the reporter, “I hope you’ll miss me,” adding that he has “been on their list for a long time.” And in a subsequent social media post Friday night, he warned of a catastrophic response he instructed the administration to pursue in the event Tehran succeeds.
“1000 Missiles are Locked and Loaded and aimed at the Islamic Republic of Iran,” he wrote, “with thousands of more to immediately follow, should the Iranian Government act on its threat, pronounced in many corners of the Globe, to assassinate, or attempt to assassinate, the sitting President of the United States of America, in this case, ME!”
The United States had a decades-old prohibition against assassinating foreign leaders before Trump’s presidency, codified in an executive order signed by President Ford in 1976 over concerns of a CIA plot to kill Fidel Castro.
The policy was only strengthened further by subsequent administrations, fearing a new international standard for targeted killings could result in unintended consequences in the halls of Washington.
Other administrations have been accused of targeting foreign leaders before. Under the Obama administration, an international coalition targeting the Libyan regime of Moammar Kadafi during the country’s 2011 civil war struck his fleeing convoy, leading to his capture and killing by rebel fighters.
But experts say Trump’s explicit targeting of Suleimani and Khamenei — and his public celebration of their deaths — marks a new paradigm.
“Through words and actions, President Trump has done more to normalize political violence than any other U.S. president, certainly in modern times,” said Robert Pape, a professor at the University of Chicago and author of “Our Own Worst Enemies: America in the Age of Violent Populism.”
“On the international front alone, the president routinely brags about killing Iranian leaders and seizing the leader of Venezuela, among others,” he added, “to the point that assassination is becoming the new normal in international politics.”
US prosecutors reach into Somalia for a suspect in US fraud case.
Published On 27 Jun 202627 Jun 2026
Mogadishu, Somalia – United States prosecutors have reached across the world to seize a leading suspect in a Minnesota fraud case, arresting him in the Somali capital, Mogadishu.
Abdikerm Abdelahi Eidleh, 42, was taken into custody on Thursday, with US authorities announcing the arrest on Friday. His capture is the clearest sign yet that the pursuit of those behind the scheme has gone international.
list of 3 itemsend of list
Neither US nor Somali officials have disclosed how Eidleh was located. However, the Department of Justice said his arrest was the result of cooperation between the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Somalia’s National Intelligence and Security Agency.
Prosecutors describe Eidleh as the alleged second-in-command to Aimee Bock, the convicted mastermind of a scheme built around Feeding Our Future, a Minnesota nonprofit that channelled federal money meant to feed needy children during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In 2022, the US charged 47 people over a roughly $250m fraud that exploited a federal child-nutrition programme, the largest pandemic-relief fraud prosecuted in the country to that point.
Eidleh fled to Somalia as the scheme unravelled. Bock was recently sentenced to more than 40 years in prison.
According to prosecutors, Eidleh recruited operators into the scheme and collected bribes and kickbacks, often disguised as consulting fees and funnelled through shell companies.
He is accused of setting up his own meal sites under the names of stand-in owners, falsely claiming they were serving thousands of children a day, and inventing supplier firms to bill the government for food never delivered.
“This is a big fish,” US Attorney for Minnesota Daniel Rosen told CBS News, calling Eidleh a key figure who recruited businesses and paid bribes to loot public money.
The Trump administration has seized on the Feeding Our Future case to target Minnesota’s Somali community, the largest in the country, with about 84,000 people of Somali descent in the Minneapolis-St Paul area.
Most were born in the US or are naturalised citizens.
Somalia was placed among a list of countries on Trump’s travel ban when he returned to power in 2025 and he has also threatened to revoke the citizenship of naturalised Americans convicted of fraud.
Late last year, he also described Somalis as “garbage” in one of his many rhetorical attacks on both Somalia and the Somali American community.
Federal immigration enforcement agents flooded the Minneapolis area, and two people were killed by ICE agents – Renee Good in early January and the nurse Alex Pretti weeks later – igniting weeks of protest.
In January, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem moved to end Temporary Protected Status, a designation shielding people from deportation to dangerous homelands, for about 1,100 Somalis, ending protections that had stood since 1991.
A federal judge blocked the termination in March, and the legal fight continues.
Former Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda (2-L) speaks during the 2024 Jeju Forum for peace and prosperity at a convention center on the country’s southern Jeju Island, South Korea. Photo by YONHAP / EPA
June 19 (Asia Today) — Former North Korean diplomats have alleged that a North Korean education specialist affiliated with UNESCO and being considered as a speaker at an international forum in South Korea may be connected to Pyongyang’s intelligence apparatus.
Jang Kwang-chol is under consideration to participate by video in a session titled “UNESCO and the Future of Education: Challenges and Prospects” at the 21st Jeju Forum for Peace and Prosperity, according to forum organizers.
The forum, jointly hosted by South Korea’s Foreign Ministry, the Jeju provincial government and other organizations, is scheduled to take place from Wednesday through June 26 at Haevichi Hotel & Resort Jeju and Jeju Stone Park.
The former diplomats’ allegations regarding Jang could not be independently verified. Neither UNESCO nor the North Korean government was quoted as responding to the claims.
Several former North Korean diplomats said Pyongyang selects Foreign Ministry officials for assignments at United Nations agencies to secure international assistance, collect information about foreign governments and South Korea and earn foreign currency.
They alleged that officials selected for such work sometimes receive fabricated or altered professional backgrounds tailored to the agency where they will serve.
Before deployment, the officials may formally transfer their affiliation to an intelligence organization such as North Korea’s Reconnaissance General Bureau, the former diplomats claimed. Such an arrangement, they said, allows the officials to operate with greater independence than ordinary North Korean diplomats.
UNESCO materials identify Jang as an education specialist who earned a doctorate in education from Kim Hyong Jik University of Education and previously worked for North Korea’s Education Ministry.
The former diplomats alleged that at least part of that professional background could serve as a cover for intelligence-gathering duties.
Ko Young-hwan, a former first secretary at the North Korean Embassy in the Republic of Congo, told Asia Today that North Korea has frequently dispatched what it calls international civil servants to U.N. organizations.
“When they were sent abroad in the past, their affiliations were transferred to organizations under the Workers’ Party, such as the United Front Department or the External Information Investigation Department, also known as Office 35,” Ko said.
“After those organizations were consolidated, I understand that their affiliations were transferred to the Reconnaissance General Bureau.”
Ko, who later headed South Korea’s National Institute for Unification Education, said he believed Jang could fall into that category.
North Korea created the Reconnaissance General Bureau in 2009 by combining intelligence and operational units that had previously been divided among the Workers’ Party and the military.
South Korean authorities have described the bureau as North Korea’s principal organization for overseas intelligence collection, cyber operations and clandestine activities.
Former North Korean diplomats also said officials assigned to international organizations operate with fewer restrictions than diplomats posted to embassies.
Ko recalled an official who worked at UNESCO headquarters in Paris while he was serving in the North Korean Foreign Ministry.
“He attended a weekly self-criticism session at the embassy only once a week and did not have to report unless something unusual occurred,” Ko said.
Ryu Hyun-woo, a former acting North Korean ambassador to Kuwait, said such officials can operate independently under special circumstances.
“They are diplomats who act alone in exceptional situations,” Ryu said. “I understand that they receive separate, specialized training before being dispatched.”
The Jeju Forum’s organizers said education innovation is one of this year’s major themes and that Jang is being considered because he is a UNESCO-affiliated official suited to the education session.
The organizers have not publicly suggested that his proposed participation is connected to intelligence activity.
Some observers, however, have interpreted the invitation as a possible attempt to reopen communication with North Korea amid strained inter-Korean relations.
The outreach comes after the Jeju provincial government provided North Korea with about 160 million won ($116,000) worth of agricultural and medical supplies, including hallabong citrus seedlings, chemicals used to combat pine wilt disease and kidney dialysis equipment.
The provincial government’s North Korea assistance program has also drawn scrutiny following reports that Jeju Gov. Oh Young-hun had contact with Ri Ho-nam, a former counselor at the North Korean Embassy in Beijing who has been identified by South Korean sources as an operative involved in inter-Korean affairs.
No evidence was presented in the article showing that Jang had engaged in espionage or other illegal activity in connection with the Jeju Forum.
— Reported by Asia Today; translated by UPI
© Asia Today. Unauthorized reproduction or redistribution prohibited.
Original Korean report: https://www.asiatoday.co.kr/kn/view.php?key=20260619010006871
EVIAN-LES-BAINS, France — President Trump said Wednesday that he was delaying federal prosecutor Jay Clayton’s nomination to lead the U.S. intelligence community in a bid to force Congress to act on a voter ID bill that currently lacks enough support for passage.
The Republican president said in a social media post just hours before Clayton’s scheduled confirmation hearing that he will keep Bill Pulte, a top U.S. housing official, as acting director of national intelligence. Democratic and Republican lawmakers had opposed Trump’s selection of Pulte, citing his lack of known experience in intelligence and his use of his current administration perch to target perceived adversaries of the president — resistance that last week forced Trump to turn to Clayton.
The abrupt announcement creates instant uncertainty over the long-term leadership of the 18-agency intelligence community and dashes hopes for a swift renewal of a crucial surveillance program that expired in Congress last week due to bipartisan anger over Trump’s pick of Pulte.
That tool, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, permits spy agencies to collect without a warrant the communications of targeted foreigners located outside the United States. National security officials across both major political parties have for years described Section 702 as vital for gathering intelligence that can disrupt terror attacks and espionage operations, though some lawmakers and civil liberties advocates have raised concerns over the government’s use of information about Americans that is incidentally collected through the program.
Clayton had been set to appear on Wednesday for a Senate confirmation hearing that was fast-tracked because of the program’s lapse. Democrats had said they would not renew the expired surveillance programs until Trump withdrew the selection of Pulte.
Trump’s post suggests that debate to revive Section 702 could be indefinitely postponed. Lawmakers have sounded the alarm about the government operating without congressional authorization of the powerful spy tool.
A court order from last March certified that the program could continue for another 12 months, though it’s possible that communications companies could challenge the government’s authority to force them to cooperate and share data.
In his social media post, Trump accused Democrats of breaking a deal to renew the program after he nominated Clayton. Trump also said he does not want to remove Clayton from his current position as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York before his replacement, James McDonald, is approved. McDonald was named to the Justice Department post on Saturday.
And Trump added another condition: linking his approval of the surveillance program to the passage of a bill requiring people to show ID to vote.
“Therefore, to add a slight bit of intrigue but, for the Good of the Nation, and the People of our Country, I will not approve FISA without THE SAVE AMERICA ACT going along with it,” Trump said, using the acronym for the surveillance program and his name for the voter ID bill.
The Republican-controlled Congress has not acted on the voting bill because it does not have enough support in either chamber, particularly from Democrats.
Trump made the announcement in Evian-les-Bains, France, where he was participating in the final day of the Group of Seven summit of leading industrial economies.
The intelligence director position became available after Tulsi Gabbard, who had held the job, announced last month that she was resigning to spend time with her husband as he fights cancer.
Clayton, a chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission during Trump’s first term, has spent the last 14 months as the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, one of the Justice Department’s premier posts.
His office during that time facilitated the unsealing of thousands of pages of court records from the prosecutions of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, documents that were made public as part of the Justice Department’s release of records related to the late sex offender and his longtime confidant.
Clayton has also overseen the prosecution of former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and Maduro’s wife, Cilia Flores, on drug trafficking charges.
Epstein died by suicide in a New York jail cell in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. Maxwell was convicted of luring teenage girls to be sexually abused by Epstein but insists she’s innocent. Maduro and his wife have protested their capture and said they’re not guilty.
Madhani, Superville, Tucker and Jalonick write for the Associated Press. Superville reported from Geneva. Tucker and Jalonick reported from Washington.
Behind a veil of good-natured diplomacy, American adversaries are exploiting the conflict in Iran by gaining insights, strategic lessons, and geopolitical power while the United States wages feckless war against the Middle Eastern theocracy. Beyond the bombings, the blockade, and the oil prices, Russia and China keenly watch how America struggles, succeeds, and scrambles. In doing so, these adversaries are leveraging the conflict to challenge America’s readiness, aid its adversaries, and gain invaluable intel on America’s successes and failures.
The concept of observing a conflict to acquire critical intelligence on how to best conduct combat is not unique to the war in Iran. For example, in the Russo-Ukrainian War, America has gained indispensable knowledge on the most and least effective tools of 21st-century warfare, including information on the power of unmanned aerial systems. With the war in Iran, though, Russia and China are the scientists, and America is the experiment. The Middle East is now a testing ground for cutting-edge drone swarm technologies and a catalyst for how smaller powers can effectively deny their adversaries from accomplishing their objectives—a lesson that China is certainly eager to learn about for a possible conflict over Taiwan. Therefore, when America wages war against Iran, there are consequences that are crucial to recognize, and one of those consequences is that the United States is inadvertently empowering and informing its adversaries.
Maintaining its signaled commitment of multipolarity and geopolitical neutrality, China’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning commented, “…China…has been making active efforts to promote ceasefire and peace…we will continue playing an active role in restoring…tranquility to the Middle East…” Reality demonstrates that this is false. China is discreetly gaining intelligence on the U.S. military’s readiness, pacing, and warfighting strategies. Furthermore, China has directly supported Iran, providing anti-missile weaponry, building blocks for ballistic missiles, and invaluable military intelligence to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. Instead of promoting peace and tranquility, these actions are designed to empower Iran and keep America locked in the struggle, weakening the country and allowing China to acquire more intelligence on U.S. readiness. Despite China’s claimed intentions, it’s clear that the nation is bolstering Iran’s strength and sustaining its defenses. Even from a domestic point of view, these actions are increasing domestic American division and the depletion of America’s defense resources. The conflict with Iran is not limited to Iran; by proxy, it’s with America’s foremost adversaries, too.
Similarly, Russia has provided critical support to Iran in the form of targeting intelligence, which Iran couldn’t have otherwise acquired. Shahed drones, assets that have proven to be exceptionally effective against western defenses, are manufactured in Russia’s Alabuga Special Economic Zone and are being provided to Iran by Russia. Contradicting these actions, a statement by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs declared that the country “…stands ready to assist in advancing peaceful solutions grounded in international law, mutual respect, and a balanced consideration of interests.” But equipping Iran with efficacious tools of war is not a peaceful solution. Giving the nation targeting information cannot be construed as a neutral or geopolitically insignificant act. In reality, America’s adversaries are taking an active, hands-on approach to the war in Iran, indirectly but clearly aiding the nation and actively working against U.S. goals.
In response to this tacit yet significant aid to Iran, the natural response for America should be to publicly highlight the hostile actions of its adversaries. But the United States has been hesitant, if not downright unwilling, to do so. For example, Matthew Whitaker, the U.S. Permanent Representative to NATO, commented that “China certainly is not participating and is not aiding and abetting the Iranian demise…” Separately, he claimed, “There’s no indication that we can talk about publicly that the Russians are participating with the Iranians.” Public investigations, though, have proven both those assertions false. The trepidation of the United States to clearly and confidently condemn its adversaries’ belligerence in the region is an enormous blunder of strategic communications. Contrasting this, Russia and China have simultaneously and aggressively pursued campaigns of condemnation to weaken America’s global power. For example, Russia has often claimed that certain U.S. support to Ukraine may constitute an act of war; China strongly condemned recent American intervention in Venezuela as violating the international laws by which America claims to be guided. U.S. adversaries are eager and willing to strategically undermine and criticize U.S. actions, yet America is unwisely unwilling to do the same.
Russia’s and China’s cooperative aid to Iran demonstrates that the conflict is, in many senses, between world powers. A new ‘axis of resistance’ against Western liberalism is developing, and allowing American adversaries to act without denunciation is a failure of strategic communications and allows these nations to act with undeserved impunity. As the United States continues to wage war against Iran, it’s crucial to recognize that every bomb America drops, every mission American soldiers complete, and every destroyed military asset is a datapoint that U.S. adversaries will exploit. Russia’s and China’s critical support to Iran is hostile and counter to American goals; ignoring this is strategically imprudent. Beyond the explosions, America’s adversaries are watching—and acting. It’s the responsibility of the United States to expose those actions for what they really are.
WASHINGTON — President Trump said Thursday that he plans to nominate Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York and a former Securities and Exchange Commission chairman, as director of national intelligence.
Trump announced the nomination on social media amid pressure from Congress to name a permanent replacement for Tulsi Gabbard, who resigned last month. Trump faced intense pushback over his decision to name Bill Pulte, head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, as acting director.
The situation has led to a standoff in Congress as Democrats said they would refuse to renew foreign intelligence powers unless Trump pulled Pulte’s nomination and named a permanent nominee.
“Few people anywhere in the Legal Community are respected at the level of Jay,” Trump wrote. “I encourage the United States Senate to confirm Jay as soon as possible.”
Interim ODNI chief Bill Pulte has been slammed by Democrats as a Trump loyalist with no intelligence background.
Published On 10 Jun 202610 Jun 2026
United States President Donald Trump has directed Bill Pulte to cut staff at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) as soon as he takes up his role as acting intelligence chief.
The order came in a Truth Social post on Wednesday, in which Trump doubled down on his choice of Pulte, a controversial pick.
list of 3 itemsend of list
“I have named William Pulte to be Acting Director of National Intelligence, who will take over on June 19th, and have asked him to execute the immediate and needed downsizing of the office, reverting staff to their home agencies,” Trump wrote.
Pulte’s appointment has sparked bipartisan pushback, with Democrats especially questioning his qualifications.
A businessman with ties to construction and private equity, Pulte has no intelligence or military background, and critics see him as a Trump loyalist who has attacked the president’s critics.
In Wednesday’s post, Trump did emphasise he was already searching for Pulte’s successor. “I am looking for a permanent ODNI Nominee with experience in National Security,” he wrote.
But Pulte’s short-term appointment has become a flashpoint in Congress, with Democrats refusing to renew a controversial surveillance measure until a permanent pick is selected.
When he takes up his interim role next week, Pulte will succeed former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who stepped down last month after her husband was diagnosed with cancer.
But Congress members like Democrat Mark Warner, a key figure on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, have decried Pulte as “grossly unqualified”.
Warner and other leaders have also warned that Pulte’s appointment would complicate negotiations to renew Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which allows warrantless surveillance of communications involving foreigners.
That measure is divisive on both sides of the aisle, as it has also resulted in the surveillance of US citizens. It allows intelligence agencies to collect emails, texts and phone data without warrants, if the communications in question are believed to involve individuals outside the US.
Warner said naming Pulte to head the ODNI was like “throwing a live hand grenade” into Congress’s efforts to reauthorise Section 702.
Last week, all but one Senate Democrat and seven Republicans voted against a three-year extension of Section 702, citing concerns about Pulte. Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman was the only Democrat to break party ranks in that 52-47 vote.
But Trump has called on Congress to pass a temporary extension of Section 702, denouncing Democrats for blocking the bill.
“Just like they did on Border Funding, the Radical Left Dumocrats [sic] are trying to take our National Security hostage because of unrelated issues,” Trump wrote on Wednesday. “They should stop playing politics with the safety of our Great Country.”
Still, Trump has faced backlash from within his Republican Party, with congressional leaders calling on the president to select a permanent intelligence chief to put the matter to bed.
“We don’t need a weaponised DNI [director of national intelligence],” Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters. “We need professionals here.”
Critics have questioned whether Pulte would use US intelligence capabilities to persecute Trump’s perceived political enemies.
Currently, the 38-year-old Pulte serves as the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency.
In that position, Pulte has accused several of Trump’s adversaries of mortgage fraud. They include Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, New York Attorney General Letitia James and Democratic Senator Adam Schiff, all of whom Trump has personally attacked.
Democrats have accused the 38-year-old Pulte of weaponising his government role for political aims.
China strongly condemns the Israeli airstrikes and ground incursion into southern Lebanon, describing these operations as a dangerous escalation that threatens the stability of the entire region. China demands that Israel immediately cease its military operations and fully withdraw its forces from Lebanese territory, warning of the dangers of its incursions and violations of established lines. China views the fourth round of Washington talks between Lebanon and Israel and the military tensions as an extension of a broader crisis. Beijing sees this conflict as a consequence of the Gaza war, emphasizing clear principles in its intelligence and military assessment of the situation across several axes, most notably the necessity of an Israeli withdrawal and a ceasefire. Beijing calls for an immediate cessation of military operations and the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Lebanese territory, warning that expanding ground operations will drag the region into chaos. China’s efforts in the reconstruction of Lebanon focus on providing urgent humanitarian aid packages, signing development cooperation agreements, and encouraging Chinese companies to participate in infrastructure projects and long-term investments within the framework of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. China also defended the Lebanese position in the face of Israeli escalation at the United Nations, with its representative to the Security Council emphasizing that Israel’s advance to Beaufort Castle (Qalaat Al-Shaqif) was the most serious incursion into southern Lebanon in 30 years. He called on the international community to take urgent measures before the situation in Lebanon deteriorated further, demanding respect for Lebanese sovereignty and the withdrawal of all Israeli forces from southern Lebanon.
The most prominent features of these Chinese efforts for joint cooperation with the Lebanese side and the international community in the reconstruction of Lebanon and the cessation of Israeli attacks on southern Lebanon are the provision of direct financial and development support. The Chinese and Lebanese governments signed a development cooperation agreement in Beirut worth 50 million Chinese yuan to support reconstruction and sustainable development efforts, along with the provision of urgent humanitarian aid. China delivered shipments of emergency humanitarian aid through the Port of Beirut to alleviate the economic and living burdens on the Lebanese people. Furthermore, China encouraged the participation of Chinese companies and investments in reconstruction and development efforts in Lebanon. Beijing has expressed its readiness to encourage its major companies and national institutions to participate in Lebanon’s reconstruction projects and support the development of the energy, telecommunications, and infrastructure sectors through China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Lebanon has been a partner in this Chinese initiative since joining in 2017. China aims to enhance Lebanon’s role as a pivotal hub for trade and logistics in the Middle East. In addition to sustained Chinese diplomatic efforts, China has continued its diplomatic and developmental support for Lebanon, alongside its active participation in UN peacekeeping operations in southern Lebanon.
China’s role in halting the Israeli war on Lebanon has focused on exerting diplomatic pressure through the United Nations and utilizing international platforms to call for an immediate ceasefire and the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Lebanese territory, while supporting political and diplomatic solutions to prevent the conflict from escalating. China has consistently called for an end to Israeli military operations against Lebanon during UN sessions and warned that the collapse of ceasefires places the region on a more dangerous precipice. Beijing called for the immediate withdrawal of Israeli forces from the devastated Lebanese territories, emphasizing the need to respect international resolutions, Lebanon’s sovereignty and independence, and the protection of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). China stressed the importance of ensuring that UN peacekeepers could carry out their duties freely and safely and condemned any attacks against UNIFIL personnel. China also emphasized the need to intensify humanitarian aid to the Lebanese people to address the repercussions of the war and expressed its full readiness to contribute to restoring regional stability.
Here, Chinese diplomatic and intelligence agencies affirmed that Lebanon’s sovereignty and security must not be violated, stressing that extending the authority of the Lebanese state and protecting its stability are the fundamental pillars for preventing the entire region from sliding into a comprehensive regional war. They reiterated the necessity of respecting Lebanon’s sovereignty and security, considering the stability and protection of the Lebanese state as essential to preventing a full-blown regional war. China also expressed its full support for the role of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) and emphasized the need to provide guarantees for its protection and freedom of movement to carry out its mission. From an analytical perspective, Beijing believes that a political solution to the crisis must include respect for international resolutions and adherence to the two-state solution for Palestine and Israel. It also expressed concern that these negotiations might lead to regional arrangements that serve the interests of certain major powers and marginalize other parties in the region. On the other hand, China welcomes dialogue and diplomatic solutions as a means to ease tensions in the Middle East and supports efforts to restore Lebanon’s sovereignty. However, Beijing has criticized unilateral US actions in managing interconnected issues such as Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran, emphasizing the need to adhere to international resolutions and support regional stability, avoiding military interventions and the expansion of conflict.
Beijing adopts a clear strategic vision regarding the Lebanese crisis, which is summarized in its emphasis on respecting sovereignty. Chinese diplomacy strongly condemns any violations of Lebanese sovereignty and calls for an immediate halt to foreign military operations on Lebanese territory to ensure the safety of civilians. With Chinese intelligence and military agencies calling for a monopoly on weapons, a position reiterated by the Chinese Permanent Representative to the UN Security Council, China supports the Lebanese state as the sole guarantor of internal stability. This signifies Beijing’s strong support for the principle of state monopoly on weapons, considering official institutions the only guarantor of internal stability and the prevention of the country’s disintegration. China also supports the UNIFIL forces, opposing the termination of the UNIFIL mandate and demanding that it be enabled to fulfill its mission to ensure stability in southern Lebanon and contribute to regional de-escalation. Beijing emphasizes that escalation will not resolve crises, urging conflicting parties (including Washington and Tehran) to prioritize diplomacy and political negotiation to exercise restraint.
June 6 (UPI) — A former Central Intelligence Agency officer who was caught with $40 million in gold bars allegedly created a fake intelligence program in order to steal the money.
David J. Rush was arrested in May and charged with theft of public funds after he lied to the agency about his military history, education and pilot license, and was then accused of stealing the gold bars and $2 million in cash that was found in his home.
U.S. officials have now said that Rush created a fake intelligence operation, or “special access program,” related to the “continuity of government operations” that he used to convince another agent to transfer the money to his operation, The New York Times and The Washington Post reported.
“He made up a contract,” one of the officials told The Post.
Rush allegedly read in two CIA colleagues on the fraudulent operation, which he claimed was related to keeping the government running in the event of a catastrophic event, such as destructive weather or a military attack.
It is not clear how the former officer was able to create a secret program and obtain the funds without involving superiors in the agency, but he managed to convince one of the colleagues to purchase the gold and transfer it to him.
The fact that Rush managed to apply to and was hired by the CIA using false credentials has raised questions about the agency’s background checks and security when hiring, the Times and the Post reported.
Additionally, several former U.S. officials question how somebody could be hired and then assigned to a significantly sensitive intelligence-gathering program that is classified.
Rush was caught and charged after the agency conducted a review of expenses and could not locate the gold or cash he had requested.
ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE — President Trump said Friday that he wants Bill Pulte, his new acting director of national intelligence, to cut the office, which has already been significantly scaled back during his second term.
Trump noted that the size of the office has been “way too high for way too long” and that “if he cut, I wouldn’t mind.”
“Bill Pulte is very good, he’s very talented,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One as he traveled to Wisconsin. The Republican president said in an earlier interview with the Wall Street Journal that he has asked Pulte to start the process of firing employees.
In the interview with the Journal, the president says he has already conveyed his view to Pulte, the incoming acting director of national intelligence, who has served as head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency but apparently has no national security expertise.
“I’d like to see it smaller. I think there are a lot of people in there that shouldn’t be there,” Trump said, which the Journal said was in reference to intelligence community officials who had served in the Democratic administrations of Presidents Biden and Obama.
Trump told the Journal that he wants Pulte to “start the process” of firing personnel and that the eventual permanent director of national intelligence should continue it. The president has indicated that he would not formally nominate Pulte for the position.
“Frankly, it might be good for him to shake it up before people come,” Trump said. “Because, if he [Pulte] reduced the size, in conjunction with me … and in conjunction with possibly the person coming in … he can do a lot of the hard work and we wouldn’t have to saddle somebody that goes in.”
Pulte was tapped by the president earlier this week in a surprising move that has been met with bipartisan resistance in the Senate, which confirms presidential nominations. The temporary appointment has now snarled the renewal of a critical national security surveillance program on Capitol Hill, with Democrats key to the vote pointing out that they did not trust Pulte — whose office oversees 18 intelligence agencies — to help administer the surveillance program.
Under Pulte’s successor, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence’s office had already taken steps to scale back its size. In August, the Trump administration said that the office’s budget would be cut by more than $700 million per year, while slashing the size of its workforce.
At the time, Gabbard said the office had become “bloated and inefficient” while she announced the roughly 40% workforce reduction.
Gabbard resigned last month after revealing her husband’s cancer diagnosis.
Price and Kim write for the Associated Press. Kim reported from Washington.
June 4 (UPI) — Acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte, whose new assignment has drawn bipartisan criticism, won’t be the “permanent” choice for the job, President Donald Trump said Thursday.
Trump, speaking to reporters Thursday the White House, said Pulte’s role as acting director of DNI to replace Tulsi Gabbard, which began Tuesday, would not be “permanent.”
Rather, the president said Pulte will be “very good” as he takes the job on for a “little while,” while also asserting he will be able to “figure it out quickly.”
Gabbard announced her resignation in May, saying she will step down June 30, and Trump’s pick of Pulte to replace her two days ago ignited a backlash among lawmakers of both parties.
A former housing developer and currently director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Pulte — a staunch Trump loyalist — has no experience in foreign intelligence work, a fact that has sparked criticism from both sides of the political aisle.
Sen. Thom Tillis., R-N.C., on Wednesday blasted Pulte as an “incendiary attack dog” for Trump who likely wouldn’t pass Senate muster for confirmation.
“I don’t think he has a prayer” of becoming the permanent DNI, Tillis told CNBC, adding that Pulte’s presence could hurt the GOP congressional majority’s efforts to reauthorize the part of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act governing warrantless surveillance.
Similarly, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., a long-serving member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, decried the choice of Pulte for DNI director, saying Trump is “appointing his top political henchman to one of the most important positions for protecting the safety of Americans and preventing terrorist attacks like September 11th.”
Pulte, he said, “appears to be unscathed by intelligence or any semblance of ethics,” noting he has already used his post at a housing agency “to persecute Trump’s political opponents, including Senator Adam Schiff, New York Attorney General Leticia James and Federal Reserve Board member Lisa Cook.”
Pulte has alleged fraud against several of Trump’s foes in their mortgage applications, including Cook for claiming two different homes as her primary residence. She has appealed her firing by Trump to the U.S. Supreme Court.
WASHINGTON — President Trump said Thursday that federal housing finance regulator Bill Pulte, his pick for acting director of national intelligence, would not be his “permanent” choice for the critical security post.
The Republican president’s disclosure that he was ruling out installing Pulte in the position full time came after bipartisan pushback on Capitol Hill in recent days over Pulte’s lack of national security experience. The position requires Senate confirmation, something that lawmakers indicated was unlikely if Pulte were the nominee.
“He’s not going to be permanent because, you know, I don’t think he’d want to be permanent,” Trump said while taking questions in the Oval Office after an event on coal. He called Pulte a “very smart guy” and said he may look at past elections that Trump claims, without credible evidence, were “rigged” against him.
Trump said other candidates were under consideration for nomination to the post. “We’re interviewing people right now,” he said.
Pulte, a grandson of the founder of PulteGroup, has been a source of controversy within the administration for his work as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency and his oversight of the mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Pulte has used his position to pursue Trump’s perceived political rivals for alleged mortgage fraud and has verbally attacked Jerome H. Powell, whose term as the Federal Reserve chairman recently ended after months of Trump and Pulte attacking him for not slashing the central bank’s benchmark rates. The federal housing finance regulator has also pitched a 50-year mortgage, an idea that backfired as it meant that the process of building wealth through homeownership would be slowed.
Both Republican and Democratic senators expressed concerns about Pulte and his lack of national security credentials in occupying a role coordinating 18 federal agencies involved in domestic and foreign security issues. Trump’s initial director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, resigned last month, citing her husband’s recent cancer diagnosis.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, a Republican from South Dakota, said the national intelligence director job shouldn’t be “weaponized” and should be led by “professionals.”
Republican Sens. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and John Cornyn of Texas, who are each leaving the chamber after this year’s elections, also expressed concerns about Pulte.
Democratic senators view Pulte as a risk even if he is serving only temporarily as the director of national intelligence while keeping his position at the FHFA.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) sent Trump a letter on Thursday calling on him to rescind Pulte’s national security appointment.
“Americans cannot trust him to protect our nation and refrain from misusing the sensitive information he will have access to,” Warren wrote, saying that giving Pulte the job on an acting basis was a risk because Trump’s own words suggested the federal agency could be used “to promote election denial theories.”
At a hearing on Wednesday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent confirmed reports that he had threatened to fight Pulte in September, a sign of the friction that the federal housing finance director had generated inside the administration.
But as a frequent traveler on Air Force One, Pulte has a close relationship with Trump.
“He’s a person who’s got high integrity,” Trump said Thursday about Pulte.
Boak writes for the Associated Press.
United States President Donald Trump has appointed businessman and federal housing regulator Bill Pulte as acting director of national intelligence (DNI).
Trump made Tuesday’s surprise announcement on social media that Pulte would replace Tulsi Gabbard, the former Hawaii congresswoman who has served as the director of national intelligence until recently.
Trump said Pulte will keep his other positions in addition to taking over from Gabbard, who resigned last month after revealing her husband’s cancer diagnosis.
Pulte, 38, a graduate of Northwestern University, has been director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) since March 2025.
He is heir to his family’s residential development firm – one of the US’s largest homebuilders, PulteGroup, which was founded by his grandfather in the 1950s. He previously founded a private equity firm, Pulte Capital, and is involved in large-scale philanthropic activity.
Pulte is seen as a loyal Trump supporter and has encouraged prosecutions of the president’s perceived political enemies, accusing New York Attorney General Letitia James and California’s US Senator Adam Schiff, both Democrats, and Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, an appointee of Democratic former President Joe Biden, of mortgage fraud.
A federal grand jury refused to indict James in a Justice Department prosecution in December 2025 after Pulte wrote a criminal referral to the Justice Department, accusing her of listing a home she owned in Virginia as her primary residence to secure more favourable loan terms. Officials have also not brought charges against Schiff, who denies the allegations against him.
Trump attempted to fire Cook – an unprecedented move by a president against a US central bank official – over Pulte’s unsubstantiated accusations, but courts allowed her to remain in the role. She, too, denied the allegations. The Supreme Court is expected to rule in the coming weeks in her case.
In response to Pulte’s actions, Senate Democratic Leader Charles Schumer called the newly appointed director of national intelligence a “partisan thug” on Tuesday.
“A guy who can file such baseless, political and outrageous charges against political office holders he doesn’t like can’t be entrusted to protect our national security,” Schumer said.
Pulte’s views on whether the 2020 election was rigged against Trump – a claim many of his appointees have backed despite a lack of any evidence – are not immediately clear. He is understood to have deleted 25,000 social media posts before Trump nominated him to serve as FHFA head in January 2025, Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat, said during his vetting process for the position.
Trump said Pulte will continue as FHFA director and chair of federally supported mortgage banks Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
“William has deep experience managing the most sensitive matters in America, the safety and soundness of the Markets, and over 10 Trillion Dollars at Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac, a substantial increase from where it was just 12 months ago,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.
Pulte, who has no experience in intelligence operations, will oversee 18 intelligence departments including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA), which monitors foreign communications and helps defend the US against cyberattacks.
Pulte can serve in the job for up to 210 days without being confirmed by the Senate. That timeframe would allow him to stay in the post through the November midterm elections, in which Trump’s fellow Republicans are seeking to retain control of Congress.
This is significant, as Republican Senator John Thune said Pulte might have trouble winning confirmation in the narrowly divided chamber if Trump decides to nominate him to the post beyond the current temporary appointment.
“If he’s somebody we want in that position permanently, he’s got a lengthy road ahead of him,” Thune was quoted by news agency Semafor as saying.
Pulte’s appointment has drawn scepticism from lawmakers and intelligence officials.
“We don’t need a weaponised DNI. We need professionals there,” Senate Majority Leader Thune told reporters on Tuesday. “I’m trying to get more information about the current state of their thinking about that position. And, again, if he’s somebody they want in that position permanently, he’s got, as you all know, a lengthy road ahead of him.”
“I don’t see any evidence of qualifications for that job,” Republican Senator John Cornyn told reporters. Cornyn, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, lost a primary election last week to a Trump-backed challenger.
Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in response to questions about Pulte’s national security credentials: “I have no observations on the matter.”
Republican Senators Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Cornyn of Texas, all of whom are leaving the chamber after this year’s elections, joined the chorus against Pulte.
“Doesn’t seem qualified,” Cassidy said.
“When we looked at his background for the current confirmation, I thought most of his experience was in the building industry,” Tillis said. “I didn’t know he had any national security experience.”
Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia and the vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a statement on Tuesday: “The concern is not only that Mr Pulte lacks the ‘extensive national security experience’ required by statute for the job, which was created after intelligence failures led to the deaths of thousands of Americans on 9/11. It is that he appears to have been selected precisely because the White House believes he will provide the narrative it wants, not the intelligence we need.”
Senator Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts, said in a written statement on Tuesday that Trump is now “rewarding his lackey – who has no national security experience – with a perch atop our nation’s intelligence community. What could go wrong?”
WASHINGTON — President Trump has tapped Bill Pulte, head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, to be the acting director of national intelligence — putting a real estate scion and fierce Trump loyalist in a key national security post as the U.S. remains at war with Iran.
Trump made the surprise announcement Tuesday on social media that Pulte would be replacing Tulsi Gabbard, the former Hawaii congresswoman who served as the director of national intelligence.
The Republican president cited Pulte’s work at the FHFA and his role as chair of the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, saying that the 38 year-old “has deep experience managing the most sensitive matters in America, the safety and soundness of the Markets, and over 10 Trillion Dollars at Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac, a substantial increase from where it was just 12 months ago.”
Pulte’s sudden elevation to a role coordinating sensitive national security matters is a sign of how Trump is putting a priority on loyalty over a traditional resume full of previous military and intelligence assignments. It’s unclear what national security expertise Pulte has, but he has been a frequent guest on Air Force One as Trump has traveled to Mar-a-Lago, his home and club in Palm Beach, Florida.
As the grandson of the founder of PulteGroup, one of the country’s largest homebuilders, Pulte has cut a combative streak on social media and used his post at the FHFA to attack perceived opponents of the Trump administration.
His time overseeing mortgage finance has been linked with criminal referrals for mortgage fraud by public officials Trump sought to punish, including New York Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat; Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif.; and Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve, who was nominated by a Democratic president, Joe Biden.
Pulte has famously gone after then-Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell for not cutting the central bank’s benchmark interest rates as aggressively as the president wanted. He has also been linked to ideas such as the 50-year mortgage and efforts to lower mortgage rates through the purchase of home loan debt that have not paid off as promised.
Trump said Pulte will keep his other positions even as he fills in for Gabbard, who resigned last month after revealing her husband’s cancer diagnosis.
If formally nominated, Pulte would need to be confirmed by the Senate to hold the position full time.
Boak writes for the Associated Press.
There are moments in history when civilizations continue to advance materially while progressively losing confidence in the values and structures that once gave direction and coherence to collective life. Institutions continue to function, markets continue to expand, and technological progress accelerates uninterruptedly, yet beneath this movement emerges a quieter uncertainty.
As Simone Weil observed, “to be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized
need of the human soul.”[1] Yet contemporary societies often struggle to sustain those forms of
belonging and shared meaning that once anchored human communities. The crisis is
therefore not simply political or economic. It concerns meaning itself.
Artificial intelligence has appeared precisely within such a historical juncture. Most contemporary discussions approach AI primarily as a technological revolution, or as an element of economic and geopolitical competition between great powers. Governments now frame it as a strategic race, corporations present it as the next engine of productivity, and Silicon Valley often speaks of AI in the language of inevitability and destiny, recalling Aldous Huxley’s fear that technological progress might ultimately weaken rather than deepen human civilization.[2]
But such interpretations may ignore something deeper still. AI may be less the cause of a civilizational transformation than one of its clearest symptoms. It reflects a broader historical transition in which inherited moral and symbolic frameworks are dissolving faster than new forms of collective meaning can emerge.
Slouching Towards Bethlehem[3]
This condition closely resembles what Antonio Gramsci described as an interregnum: a period in which the old world is dying while the new world struggles to be born. [4] Such periods produce not only political instability, but also moral exhaustion, the erosion of shared narratives, and declining confidence in beliefs once considered self-evident. Civilizations have passed through similar moments before.
The enduring fascination of Edward Gibbon’s monumental The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire lies not merely in its account of imperial decline, but in its portrayal of the slow weakening of the moral and symbolic foundations that once sustained an entire civilization.[5] Rome did not collapse overnight. Its institutions remained impressive long after few still believed in the civilization they were meant to serve. Administrative power survived even as collective meaning and aspirations deteriorated.
That pattern feels strangely familiar.
Never before have technological capacities appeared so extensive while social distrust, political fragmentation, and loneliness have become so pervasive. Hyperconnectivity was supposed to bring societies closer together. In many cases, it has done the reverse.
AI in the Anthropocene
AI emerges from within this historical condition . It appears perfectly suited to societies organized around abstraction, speed, quantification, and technological mediation. In this sense, AI is profoundly historical. It results from a long civilizational development in which rationalization, efficiency, and technical calculation have come to replace older moral, religious, and symbolic frameworks as primary sources of legitimacy and meaning. What distinguishes AI from previous technologies is that it extends these same principles into domains traditionally considered irreducibly human. Activities once understood as distinctly human, such as reasoning, creativity, interpretation, and even emotional interaction, are now becoming technologically mediated.
The deeper unease therefore concerns anthropology as much as technology. What remains distinctively human when machines become capable of imitating reasoning, generating art, and mediating human relationships?
Such moments of civilizational disorientation are not entirely unprecedented.
The Renaissance confronted a similar rupture. Medieval Europe had long possessed a relatively coherent worldview capable of organizing religion, politics, morality, and human identity within a common order. By the late fifteenth century, however, this equilibrium was beginning to fracture under the pressure of new scientific discoveries, religious wars, and the weakening of older political and spiritual authorities. Thinkers such as Niccolò Machiavelli and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola sought, in radically different ways, to redefine humanity’s place within a rapidly changing world.[6] Pico celebrated human beings as creatures capable of shaping themselves through freedom and intellect, while Machiavelli recognized more soberly that periods of transition dissolve inherited certainties and force societies to confront instability and power directly.
Both understood that historical transformation is ultimately existential before being institutional. Our own transition may prove even more radical because technology no longer transforms only economic or political life, but cognition itself.
AI now mediates everyday experience itself: how people search for information, communicate, work, and make sense of the world around them.
Algorithms no longer merely distribute information. They shape attention, influence perception, and affect how individuals relate emotionally to public life and to one another. Under such conditions, the distinction between human judgment and technological mediation becomes far less clear.
The Price of Nostalgia
One striking feature of the contemporary digital environment is the degree to which individuals now participate voluntarily in their own data extraction. Recent Instagram trends such as the viral “What Were You Like in the ’90s?” challenge encourage users and celebrities alike to upload curated archives of personal photographs spanning decades of their lives. Presented as nostalgia and entertainment, these trends also generate immense quantities of highly valuable visual and behavioural data: faces across time, emotional reactions, aesthetic preferences, social interactions, and patterns of self-presentation. Whether or not such material is directly incorporated into future AI systems, the broader objective remains significant. Human memory, identity, and even nostalgia itself increasingly becomes raw material for computational analysis and commercial platforms.
Reactions to AI therefore oscillate easily between fascination and anxiety. Beneath both lies a deeper uncertainty about whether modern societies still possess a coherent understanding of what human beings are for, beyond economic productivity and consumption.
Friedrich Nietzsche anticipated aspects of this crisis more than a century ago. His declaration that “God is dead” did not merely constitute a theological provocation but signalled the emergence of a civilization in which traditional moral structures would lose authority long before new ones could replace them.[7] Nietzsche feared not nihilism alone, but the possibility that societies might become incapable of generating new forms of transcendence once older ones had collapsed. We saw how his worldview provided an intellectual base for Fascism.
I Read, therefore I Am
In increasingly mediated environments, the act of sustained reading itself begins to take on a countercultural character. To read is, in some sense, to resist. We have access to more information than any previous generation, yet physical books can still provide a sense of orientation. The books people return to, annotate, or simply keep close over time often reveal something enduring about the way they think and who they are.
The central issue, therefore, is not simply whether artificial intelligence will become more powerful. The deeper question is whether societies organized around AI can still sustain stable forms of responsibility and belonging strong enough to preserve coherent collective life. This is ultimately a political and civilizational problem before it is a purely technical one.
Much contemporary discourse still assumes that technological advancement naturally produces historical progress. History offers little evidence for such confidence.
Civilizations do not endure simply because they innovate technologically. They endure because they preserve, or reinvent, systems of meaning capable of holding societies together over time.
The Roman Empire mastered engineering yet gradually lost the moral cohesion that had once sustained it. Renaissance Europe produced extraordinary creativity precisely because it confronted existential instability directly rather than attempting to ignore it.
Contemporary Western societies appear caught between immense technological sophistication and growing uncertainty about their own civilizational narrative.
AI therefore represents more than innovation. It reflects a transformation in how human beings understand themselves, authority, knowledge, and reality itself. The danger is not simply that machines become too powerful. It is that societies now outsource judgment, imagination, and responsibility while slowly losing the cultural and moral resources required to govern these technologies wisely. Yet periods of interregnum are not necessarily periods of decline alone. They are also moments in which civilizations redefine themselves.
AI For Good ?
Historical transitions create possibilities as well as dangers. The Renaissance emerged from the crisis of medieval Europe. Modern democracy emerged from the upheavals of industrial society. Today’s uncertainty may likewise force Western societies to confront questions long obscured by economic growth and technological optimism:
What constitutes a good society? What forms of belonging remain possible in a hyper-mediated world? What aspects of human life should never be reduced to data, prediction, or optimization?
AI cannot answer these questions. But its emergence makes avoiding them increasingly difficult.
[1] Simone Weil, The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind (1949/1952).
[2] See Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932) and his later essays such as Brave New World Revisited (1958), where he warns that technological efficiency and social conditioning could erode authentic human experience.
[3] The phrase alludes to the final lines of W.B. Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming” (1919): “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
[4] Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks (written 1929–1935, published posthumously). The “interregnum” concept appears in Notebook 3: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
[5] Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (6 volumes, 1776–1789). Gibbon famously attributed part of the decline to the rise of Christianity and the erosion of civic virtue.
[6] Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486) — often called the “Manifesto of the Renaissance”; Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (1532) and Discourses on Livy.
[7] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882, §125 – “The Madman”) and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The full phrase is usually rendered “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.”
Tulsi Gabbard has resigned as US Director of National Intelligence, citing her husband’s cancer diagnosis. Her departure comes after months of tensions inside President Trump’s administration over foreign policy and intelligence matters, including over the decision to strike Iran.
Published On 23 May 202623 May 2026
Share
May 22 (UPI) — Tulsi Gabbard resigned as director of national intelligence Friday to support her husband, who has been diagnosed with a rare form of bone cancer.
Gabbard said in a resignation letter, which she posted on X, that after her husband Abraham Williams’ recent diagnosis she will “step away from public service to be by his side and fully support him through this battle.”
The principal deputy director of national intelligence, Aaron Lukas, will take over as acting DNI after Gabbard departs June 30, President Donald Trump said in a post on Truth Social.
“I am deeply grateful for the trust you placed in me and for the opportunity to lead the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for the last year and a half,” Gabbard said in her letter.
Gabbard, who told Trump that she is resigning during a meeting in the Oval Office on Friday, was a controversial nominee for the position.
Nearly all Republicans voted to confirm her on a party-line vote, but former Senate Republican leader Sen. Mitch McConnell voted against her because she had “failed to demonstrate” that she was ready for the position.
Before she was named DNI, Gabbard served in the U.S. House of Representatives and the Hawaii House of Representatives dating to 2002.
The decision to resign, Gabbard said, is the balance of her husband’s dedication to her career, dating to her time in the military, and that she “cannot in good conscience ask him to face this fight alone while I continue in this demanding and time-consuming position.”
In his post, Trump said that Gabbard “has done an incredible job, and we will miss her.”
“She, rightfully, wants to be with [Abraham], bringing him back to good health as they currently fight a tough battle together,” Trump said. “I have no doubt he will soon be better than ever.”
Published On 22 May 202622 May 2026
Tulsi Gabbard is resigning from her job as United States President Donald Trump’s director of national intelligence, according to her resignation letter posted on her X account.
In her resignation letter, Gabbard told Trump she was “deeply grateful for the trust you placed in me and for the opportunity to lead the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for the last year and a half”.
She cited her husband’s recent diagnosis with a rare form of bone cancer as the reason for her resignation.
More to come…
WASHINGTON — Tulsi Gabbard resigned as President Trump’s director of national intelligence on Friday, saying she needed to step away as her husband battles cancer. She is the fourth Cabinet official to depart during Trump’s second term.
“Unfortunately, I must submit my resignation, effective June 30, 2026,” Gabbard wrote in her resignation letter, which she posted on X. “My husband, Abraham, has recently been diagnosed with an extremely rare form of bone cancer.”
There had been rumblings that Gabbard would split with Trump after the president’s decision to strike Iran, which caused some division within his administration. Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, announced his resignation in March, saying he “cannot in good conscience” back the war.
Gabbard, a veteran and former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii, built her political name on her opposition to foreign wars. This put her in an awkward position when the U.S. joined Israel in launching attacks on Iran on Feb. 28.
During a congressional hearing in March, her measured comments were notable for their careful non-endorsement of Trump’s decision to strike Iran. She repeatedly dodged questions about whether the White House had been warned of potential fallout from the conflict, including Iran’s effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
Gabbard said in written remarks to the Senate Intelligence Committee that there had been no effort by Iran to rebuild its nuclear capability after U.S. attacks last year “obliterated” its nuclear program. That statement contradicted Trump, who has repeatedly asserted that the war was necessary to head off an imminent threat from the Islamic Republic.
This created several awkward exchanges with lawmakers who asked Gabbard for her opinion on the threat posed by Iran as the nation’s top intelligence official. She repeatedly said it was Trump’s decision to strike, not hers.
“It is not the intelligence community’s responsibility to determine what is and is not an imminent threat,” she said.
Gabbard’s departure follows Trump having ousted Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in late March, in the midst of mounting criticism over her leadership of the department — including the handling of the administration’s immigration crackdown and disaster response.
The second Cabinet member to leave was Attorney General Pam Bondi, in response to growing frustration over the Justice Department’s handling of files related to Jeffrey Epstein. And Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer resigned in April, after being the target of various misconduct investigations.
A veteran but without any intelligence experience, Gabbard was a surprising choice to head the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the nation’s 18 intelligence agencies. She ran for president in 2020 on a progressive platform and her opposition to U.S. involvement in foreign military conflicts.
Citing her military experience, she argued that U.S. wars in the Middle East had destabilized the region, made the U.S. less safe and cost thousands of American lives. Gabbard later dropped out of the race and endorsed the ultimate winner, President Joe Biden.
Two years later she left the Democratic Party to become an independent, saying her old party was dominated by an “elitist cabal of warmongers” and “woke” ideologues. She subsequently campaigned for several high-profile Republicans and became a contributor to Fox News.
She later endorsed Trump, who also was a strong critic of past U.S. wars in the Middle East and campaigned on a pledge to avoid unnecessary wars and nation-building overseas.
But friction with the president started soon after he began his second term and tapped Gabbard to lead ODNI, which was set up after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to improve coordination between the nation’s intelligence agencies.
Shortly after taking on the job, Gabbard testified before lawmakers that there was no intelligence suggesting Iran was seeking to develop nuclear weapons. After Trump launched attacks on Iranian nuclear sites in June he said Gabbard was wrong and that he didn’t care what she said.
She appeared to be back in Trump’s good graces when she took a lead role in Trump’s effort to relitigate his 2020 election loss to Biden, whom Gabbard had endorsed. She appeared at an FBI search of election offices in Fulton County, Georgia, even though her office was created to focus on foreign espionage, not state elections.
Earlier this week, however, she testified to lawmakers during an annual threats hearing that last year’s strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites had “obliterated” their nuclear program and that there had been no subsequent effort to rebuild.
The statement seemed to complicate Trump’s repeated assertions that Iran posed an imminent threat and created several awkward exchanges with lawmakers who asked Gabbard for her opinion on Iran’s threat as the nation’s top intelligence official. She repeatedly said that it was Trump’s decision to strike, not hers.
“It is not the intelligence community’s responsibility to determine what is and is not an imminent threat,” she said at one of this week’s hearings.
Gabbard vowed to eliminate what she said was the politicization of intelligence by government insiders. But she quickly used her office to support some of Trump’s most partisan of arguments — that he won the 2020 election.
She also worked to undermine the results of earlier investigations into Trump’s ties to Russia.
In her year on the job, Gabbard oversaw a sharp reduction in the intelligence workforce, as well as the creation of a new task force that she charged with considering big changes to the intelligence service.
Earlier this year an intelligence sector whistleblower filed a complaint that Gabbard was withholding intelligence for political reasons, a complaint that prompted calls from Democrats for Gabbard’s resignation.
Gabbard, 44, was born in the U.S. territory of American Samoa, raised in Hawaii and spent a year of her childhood in the Philippines. She was first elected as a 21-year-old to Hawaii’s House of Representatives but had to leave after one term when her National Guard unit deployed to Iraq.
As the first Hindu member of the House, Gabbard was sworn into office with her hand on the Bhagavad Gita, the Hindu devotional work. She was also the first American Samoan elected to Congress.
During her four House terms she became known for speaking out against her party’s leadership. Her early support for Sen. Bernie Sanders ’ 2016 Democratic presidential primary run made her a popular figure in progressive politics nationally.
Kinnard, Weissert and Klepper write for the Associated Press.