The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 3 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.By most indications, Donald Trump has dropped his demand for a corrupt $1.8 billion slush fund to dole out to allies and insurrectionists. This came after Republicans made it clear that they can’t support something quite that openly corrupt. And yet, Trump has responded to this with another extraordinary show of corruption. He just appointed William Pulte as his acting director of national intelligence. Pulte is best known in Washington right now for hatching bogus ways for Trump to criminally investigate his enemies. Indeed, Senate Majority Leader John Thune all but admitted that Pulte will be used to “weaponize” the Office of the DNI. Some MAGA voices in fact are openly cheering for that, rooting for him to be turned loose on the left. That’s pretty unnerving stuff.So we’re working through all of it with one of our go-to people on these matters, University of Michigan law professor Leah Litman. Leah, nice to have you on.Leah Litman: Great to be here.Sargent: So let’s talk about Bill Pulte. As director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, he took it upon himself to ransack the mortgages of Trump’s enemies to find fake things to refer to the Justice Department for criminal investigations. He did this with Senator Adam Schiff, with New York Attorney General Letitia James, with Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. Leah, what’s your reaction to the pick of Pulte here?Litman: It is so absurd as to be ridiculous. It was always going to be hard to find a worse, more ridiculous DNI than Tulsi Gabbard, and Trump just might have done that. Bill Pulte has zero national security experience. He spent, as you were suggesting, the last 18 or so months just digging up dirt on Donald Trump’s political enemies and made these criminal referrals in what I’ve been calling the mortgage fraud fraud—accusing people of conducting mortgage fraud by misrepresenting some house as their primary residence when, as various outlets have reported, a lot of people do this, it can be accidental. And also these criminal cases have gone nowhere. And so the idea that we will have a director of national intelligence who is inclined toward basically ginning up accusations and targeting the president’s political enemies is terrifying when you think about the vast powers that are part of our national security apparatus.Sargent: The director of national intelligence is a really important office. It oversees the nation’s intel agencies and it’s a really senior advisory role. It seems to me the obvious conclusion to draw is that Trump wants to do with the director of national intelligence office what he did with that obscure mortgage office. In other words, Pulte’s willingness to engage in extraordinary corruption to target Trump’s enemies made Trump look at him and say, I want him in a more powerful role and I want him to have more dangerous weapons at his disposal. Is that basically what’s going on here, Leah?Litman: I mean, that’s how I read it. I think it’s a similar story as happened with acting—or auditioning—Attorney General Todd Blanche. Donald Trump wants the people who are willing to be subservient to him and are completely willing to cross every single legal guardrail in the name of loyalty. And so yes, you’re right. He wants to give someone like that more power. We have a vast federal apparatus—law enforcement powers are sweeping—but they pale in comparison to what the national security state has.Sargent: Well, the reaction by Republican senators to Trump’s pick of Pulte was really remarkable. Senate Majority Leader John Thune was asked if he’s worried that Pulte will weaponize the DNI position. And Thune said this: “Well, we don’t need a weaponized DNI. We need professionals there.” Thune also said that if Pulte is going to go for confirmation before the Senate, he has a “lengthy road” before him. Leah, that is something else. I think Thune basically confirmed there that there is an actual danger that Trump will weaponize the DNI position. What do you think of that?Litman: So I think that that is a real danger. If you saw or heard some of the right-wing universe that was actually excited about this pick—like Steve Bannon, for example, talking with Jack Posobiec—they were talking about how maybe this would allow Bill Pulte to go after domestic terrorism in addition to foreign terrorism. And by that, they really meant the anti-ICE protesters. And so, yes, I think that the people who are excited about this pick are excited about it precisely because they are envisioning weaponizing the national security apparatus. And the people who are concerned or hesitant about it are hesitant or concerned for the exact same reason.Sargent: You mentioned Steve Bannon, so we’re going to listen to that audio.
