He Leaked Records. Now He Runs the Wiretaps.

Introduction

The Government Accountability Office is investigating Bill Pulte for pulling private citizens' mortgage records out of a federal database and using them to build criminal referrals against people Trump doesn't like. That investigation was still open on June 2, when Trump named him Acting Director of National Intelligence and put him over the program that ran roughly 3.4 million warrantless searches of Americans' communications in a single year.

What Pulte Already Did With a Smaller Database

Before the DNI job, Pulte ran the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. That gave him access to the mortgage files of basically everyone who's ever financed a home through the two government-backed lenders. According to a Senate Banking Committee account, he reached into those files and produced criminal referrals to the Justice Department against four Democrats: New York Attorney General Letitia James, Senator Adam Schiff, Representative Eric Swalwell, and Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. Every one of them is a Trump opponent. James was indicted in October 2025; the case was dismissed in November after a judge found the prosecutor was improperly appointed, and a second grand jury declined to indict ten days later. Trump tried to fire Cook off the back of Pulte's referral. She's still fighting it at the Supreme Court.

Swalwell sued Pulte in November 2025, arguing the referral violated the Privacy Act of 1974 and the First Amendment, and his 19-page complaint flagged the obvious tell: no comparable FHFA referrals had been made against Trump allies. He later dropped the suit while running for California governor, so it was never adjudicated, and FHFA denied everything as "fake news from disgruntled anonymous sources." The denial cuts the other way too, though: the James case fell on a procedural defect, not a finding that the fraud allegation was false, and a Fannie Mae fraud director's own internal message called the evidence "certainly not clear and convincing."

Eight Democratic senators asked the GAO to look into how he was doing this. The watchdog confirmed on December 4, 2025 it would "review matters relating to recent actions undertaken at the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), to determine whether the agency and its employees misused federal authority and resources." The senators put the core question plainly in their request: it was "unclear why Pulte made these claims, how he accessed the information as Director to make such claims, and whether and how official FHFA resources" were used to do it.

Then there's what he did to the people who tried to slow him down. Internal FHFA records that Democracy Forward obtained through FOIA litigation show the Office of Investigations was supposed to operate under hard rules: establish credible evidence before opening a case, document each step, stay independent of political influence, and refer matters to DOJ only after career agents reviewed them. The statute doesn't even give the FHFA director criminal-investigation authority; that sits with the inspector general. Pulte skipped the whole apparatus and demanded mortgage files directly. When Fannie Mae's ethics and investigations staff pushed back, around a dozen of them were fired or forced out in late October 2025, including the chief ethics officer and the general counsel. The acting inspector general who had forwarded their complaints to prosecutors was asked to step down.

The Database He Runs Now Doesn't Need a Warrant

Section 702 of FISA lets the NSA collect the communications of foreigners abroad without a warrant. The catch is that foreigners talk to Americans, so American communications get swept into the database "incidentally," at enormous scale. The FBI then runs searches against that pile of already-collected data without going to a judge first. A government report counted roughly 3.4 million such searches of U.S. persons in 2021 alone. In 2022 the FISA Court found the FBI's querying problems were "persistent and widespread."

The collection mostly happens through PRISM, where the NSA serves court-approved directives on U.S. tech companies and the companies hand over stored communications matching specific selectors. Per the Snowden-era NSA slides, PRISM accounts for 91% of the internet traffic the NSA acquires under 702. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Meta, Yahoo, they don't get to say no. Refusing triggers civil penalties, and the FISA Court can compel compliance through contempt, which is exactly what it did to Yahoo in 2008.

So who decides the rules for how all of that gets searched, queried, and minimized? The DNI does, jointly with the Attorney General. Under 50 U.S.C. § 1881a, the two of them certify, every year, the targeting and minimization procedures the whole program runs on, and the FISA Court has to approve those certifications before the intelligence community can implement them. The certification is the framework itself: it governs which targets get selected and what the FBI is allowed to do with the American data that comes along for the ride. That's rule-setting for the entire program. The selection criteria the DNI certifies determine, indirectly but inevitably, whose domestic communications end up searchable.

As Acting DNI, Pulte signs those certifications. He got the role without Senate confirmation, which conveniently skips the statutory requirement that the nation's top intelligence official have "extensive national security experience." His actual background is a 2010 broadcast journalism degree from Northwestern and a private equity fund he founded in 2011. He has no military, law enforcement, intelligence, or legislative background. Warner ran through that list on the Senate floor and added that nobody could even confirm whether Pulte holds a security clearance. The acting designation runs up to 210 days, which is a long time to hold the certification pen.

Who Benefits

Two people, and the payoff is power, not money.

Trump gets a loyalist running the daily intelligence briefing and the certification machinery underneath it. He said the quiet part out loud about why an acting director suits him: Pulte is "less shackled," and as Trump put it to reporters, "it sort of gives you more power." He also told reporters Pulte might "find out some things about the rigged elections," which tells you what he expects the intelligence community's tools to be pointed at. An acting appointment that bypasses the Senate is the cleanest way to install someone who'd never survive a confirmation hearing.

Pulte gets access. He's now read into classified intelligence from all 18 agencies, compared to one mortgage database. Brennan Center's Elizabeth Goitein drew the line directly: "If Pulte can do that with the limited access to Americans' information he has as head of the FHFA, imagine what he could do with all the authorities and capabilities of the intelligence community, including, of course, Section 702." Access only matters if you use it, and his FHFA record shows exactly how he uses it.

The Vote Was Never About Warrants

Every outlet covered the Senate's 47-52 failure on June 5 as a surveillance-reform fight, which is the framing it usually gets. But the timing tells a different story. Senate Intelligence Chairman Tom Cotton and Vice Chairman Mark Warner had a bipartisan three-year extension nearly done, one with new penalties for abuse and added FBI search requirements. Trump announced Pulte on June 2, and Warner's support collapsed within days.

Warner was specific about why. "The one thing we know is he's already taken confidential information and weaponized it as the head of the mortgage agencies," he said. "Does anybody think it makes good sense to give them the keys to the 18 intelligence agencies, not just on 702, but across the board?" He asked Majority Leader John Thune to lean on the White House to reverse the appointment, warning the deal would die otherwise. Trump refused. Warner then introduced an amendment that would have barred Senate-confirmed agency heads from simultaneously serving as DNI, and it failed 49-49.

The warrant debate predates Pulte. Rand Paul, Mike Lee, and a handful of other Republicans have wanted a warrant requirement for years, and an 18-month extension already died in the House back in April, before Pulte was anywhere near this. The program was fractured going in. What Pulte did was hand the wavering Democrats a reason to walk that had nothing to do with the abstract surveillance debate and everything to do with the specific person who'd be holding the keys. Once that person was named, the vote was about him.

The Bottom Line

The data is already collected. Your messages with anyone abroad are sitting in a database the FBI searched roughly 3.4 million times in a single year without a warrant, and the appointment didn't change any of that. What it changed is the person who now certifies the rules for searching it, and that person is under active investigation for treating the last government database he controlled as a tool for going after political enemies.

Section 702 expires June 12 unless Congress acts. If it gets extended in some short-term scramble before the deadline, Pulte signs the certifications either way. If it lapses, existing FISA Court orders may keep the collection running into 2027 regardless. The GAO opened its investigation into how Pulte handled mortgage records back in December and hasn't released findings. Whether a watchdog can even investigate a sitting Acting DNI is a question nobody has had to answer until now.