Trump Is Shaking Up Intel Leadership. His Cia Director Is Coming Out On Top.

Bill Pulte is about to step into the nation’s top intelligence position — and CIA Director John Ratcliffe could emerge with more power as a result.

Pulte, who is expected to start serving as acting director of national intelligence on Friday, is likely to be greeted with smiles — and some relief — over at Langley, in no small part due to the person he is replacing. The CIA has sparred frequently over the last year and half with outgoing DNI Tulsi Gabbard and her staff, many of whom could be leaving shortly as well.

President Donald Trump has said a benefit of having Pulte in an acting role is that he will likely be more free to slash the office’s headcount than any full-time head of the agency. A shrunken ODNI could end up giving the CIA director more sway across the intelligence community.

“CIA is best positioned to be the victor who claims the spoils,” said Emily Harding, who was deputy staff director of the Senate Intelligence Committee under former Republican Sen. Richard Burr (N.C.). The director of the CIA, she explained, “will have more room to maneuver and a higher profile in the community.”

It’s one of a number of developments that have gone Ratcliffe’s way in the past month. First Gabbard — whose agency clashed regularly with Ratcliffe’s — announced she was stepping down. Then Trump nominated Ratcliffe’s pick — top federal prosecutor Jay Clayton — for the permanent DNI position. Now, even as the delay in Clayton’s nomination hearing throws Congress into tumult, it puts in place an interim director who is unlikely to be seen as a competitor to Ratcliffe.

“I don’t see how things could be going better for him right now,” said Michael Casey, the former director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center and a Democratic staff director on the Senate Intelligence Committee. “He’s clearly the most influential leader in the IC. He’s seen as the adult in the room, and everyone is mad at or is trying to get rid of the only organization that really challenges him for leadership of the community.”

While the director of national intelligence oversees the CIA and the other 17 components of the U.S. spy community, there has often been a struggle for influence between the heads of ODNI and the CIA to have the ear of the president.

Pulte’s inexperience — he is a Trump loyalist with no background in national security — could also provide space for Ratcliffe to set the intel agenda for the administration. What’s more, Pulte will have multiple jobs to juggle, as Trump has said he will stay on as the head of the government’s federal housing finance regulator.

And if Clayton is eventually confirmed, that will put someone Ratcliffe trusts in the top job.

“You’re going to actually have a situation in this administration where you have a CIA director and a DNI who can get along,” Larry Pfeiffer, one of the first employees at ODNI after its creation in 2005, said of Ratcliffe and Clayton.

White House spokesperson Davis Ingle declined to address how Pulte’s appointment could affect Ratcliffe. However, he rejected the notion there was ever any friction between Trump’s spy chiefs.

“Efforts by the legacy media to sow internal division are a distraction that will not work,” he said in a statement. “President Trump has built a world-class Cabinet and he has full confidence in his entire exceptional national security team.”

CIA spokesperson Liz Lyons also declined to address questions about Ratcliffe’s working relationship with Gabbard, Pulte and Clayton. She said the agency is focused on executing its national security mission.

Spokespeople for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and Pulte’s Federal Housing Finance Agency did not respond to requests for comment.

Ratcliffe came to the CIA post as one of Trump’s most trusted advisers — having previously worked on Trump’s defense team during his first impeachment and later serving as DNI during the last eight months of his first term. Ratcliffe’s influence has only grown over the course of the past 18 months.

From the start of this administration, Trump turned to Ratcliffe, not Gabbard, when he needed the spy community’s insight on major foreign policy priorities, including military operations in Iran and Venezuela. The president also turned to the CIA chief when it came time to brief Congress about the Iran conflict, and as he began pushing lawmakers to renew a powerful spy authority called Section 702 — even though Gabbard had a statutory role in overseeing it.

Still, Gabbard created frequent headaches for Ratcliffe, often as a result of her efforts to root out perceived corruption in the intelligence community.

Last summer, she claimed to have found evidence of a “treasonous conspiracy” by former President Barack Obama and then-senior U.S. intelligence officials to concoct the narrative that Russia had supported Trump in the 2016 election. The CIA published a nitpicking review of its finding on Russian meddling that year, prompting House Intelligence Committee Chair Rep. Rick Crawford (R-Ark.) to publicly accuse the agency of a “whitewash.”

The two agencies also reportedly clashed over assessments about the Iran war. A top Gabbard aide resigned in March in protest over the decision to strike Iran.

Congress created ODNI after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to break down information-sharing stovepipes among spy agencies, better coordinate intelligence findings, and improve oversight of the intelligence community’s budget.

One worry among former intelligence officials is that Gabbard left many in D.C. with such a low impression of ODNI that it will be unable to act as a check on the CIA. That means the CIA may be more able to shape spy community decisions about the procurement of new technology intelligence priorities and analysis.

Trump’s decision to select Pulte exacerbated those worries on the Hill, with some lawmakers musing about eliminating the office shortly after his selection.

“What the last four weeks heralds is basically the end of the post 9/11 ODNI structure and a return to the dominance of the CIA in the intelligence community, for better or worse,” said Beth Sanner, who served as deputy director of national intelligence for mission integration in Trump’s first term.

Sanner said she felt much more comfortable with Ratcliffe at the helm of the U.S. intelligence community than Gabbard or Pulte. But she cautioned that the CIA director has to deal with so many of its own challenges, they have little time to think about problems elsewhere in the intelligence community, such as how to field cutting-edge commercial technology, like frontier artificial intelligence.

ODNI is not powerless though. It has broad authority to declassify intelligence information and fire spy community personnel — elements of the job that Gabbard used frequently, at one point even ousting a high-ranking CIA officer.

Some argue Pulte could similarly antagonize the CIA.

While at the housing finance regulator, Pulte publicly touted mortgage fraud investigations into Trump’s enemies, alarming Democrats who fear he could declassify sensitive intelligence information to curry favor with the president.

“The only thing he’s shown is a willingness to take confidential information in terms of private mortgage information and weaponize it, and that should be a precursor to giving him the keys of the 18 intelligence agencies?" Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), told reporters Wednesday, after it became clear Pulte would take office before Clayton’s confirmation could be finalized.

Trump has already indicated he wants Pulte to declassify more information about the 2020 election — an effort that could put him in tension with Ratcliffe, if it risks exposing U.S. spying sources and methods or leads him to target agency personnel who worked on that year’s vote.

“Pulte has the full ability to do all the damage in the world he wants,” said one former senior U.S. national security official, granted anonymity to share their views on Pulte. “No one is going to tell him ‘no’ right now cause he has the full backing of the president.”

Gregory Svirnovskiy contributed to this report.