Pulte expected to temporarily overlap with his replacement as intelligence chief

By Kristen Holmes, CNN

(CNN) — Acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte will not immediately leave his office after his more permanent replacement, Jay Clayton, is sworn in, according to a source familiar with the matter. Instead, the two men’s tenures at the top of the office will overlap for at least two weeks.

Clayton, who was confirmed by the Senate earlier this week, is expected to be sworn in as director of national intelligence next week, according to the source. Pulte is expected to stay in the office for at least two weeks after that, the source said, cautioning that the timeline could shift.

Pulte made a case to President Donald Trump directly that he wasn’t finished with the job and wanted to stay on to complete what he had set out to do, multiple sources told CNN. The combative and controversial housing executive, who had no prior national security experience, has made sharp staffing cuts to the intelligence community and played a role in declassifying certain documents related to Trump’s false claims of election fraud in 2020.

While Trump likes Pulte and was happy with his performance, including the staffing cuts, one source said the president also was fond of Clayton and understood that there was a desire to get him in the role quickly — including by senators who had initially balked at Trump’s decision to tap Pulte for the acting role.

US officials familiar with Pulte’s tenure previously suggested to CNN that he did not have enough time to accomplish all his goals tied to declassifying certain material. The declassification project largely fell to the conservative commentator John Solomon, who became a special government employee earlier this summer.

Pulte and CIA Director John Ratcliffe got into a heated dispute last week over the scope of redactions in the documents the White House planned to release related to foreign interference in the 2020 election, according to four sources familiar with the exchange. Pulte argued to make more of the text public, according to those sources, and both parties raised their voices.

But ultimately, Pulte backed down and began to defer to Ratcliffe, the sources said.

It’s difficult to measure how deep Pulte’s staffing cuts went. Current and former officials alike say the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has been deeply degraded. Pulte announced on Tuesday a fifth and “near final” round of firings, claiming in a post on X that the dismissals had cumulatively axed “approximately 30%” of staff at the top spy agency; his predecessor Tulsi Gabbard had previously announced that she planned to cut the workforce, then around 2,000 people, by 40%. CNN was not able to independently confirm those figures.

But even those who support the agency broadly cautioned against hysteria about the depth of the cuts.

For some critics, the far deeper concern with Pulte beyond his inexperience was whether he would weaponize sensitive intelligence against the president’s critics. As Director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, he helped facilitate mortgage fraud investigations against the president’s top political opponents.

This story was updated with additional context.

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CNN’s Katie Bo Lillis and Zachary Cohen contributed to this report.