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.

Background

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.

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.

Original reporting: KRDO (Colorado Springs metro) — read the source article.