President Donald Trump’s acting Director of National Intelligence got a disastrous meeting with House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), according to Politico — increasing the likelihood Trump will simply not nominate anyone for the post at all and leave him in limbo on an acting basis.
Capitol Hill insiders briefed on the meeting “were left with the impression it didn’t go very well,” said the report. Johnson, for his part, has tried to downplay this impression and has “told reporters Tuesday that the meeting went well but declined to discuss specifics. He added that ‘Democrats have taken a hostage’ and that the Senate would need to quickly figure out a path forward.”
Regardless of how the meeting went, the report said, Trump appears unwilling to cave to Democratic demands for a different nominee and will simply call their threat to let the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) expire.
Pulte, a partisan ally of Trump with no qualifying experience working in national security, is also serving as director of Trump’s Federal Housing Finance Agency, where he has spent much of his time trolling through the mortgage records of Democratic politicians and Trump critics to try to find evidence of fraud.
Some Republicans, according to the report, had hoped Trump would put forward a new nominee to break up the impasse.
All this comes as Republicans finally break a months-long logjam to pass their partisan budget bill granting tens of billions more to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol. This ends a standoff that began with Democrats refusing to commit any money to immigration enforcement without reforms to prevent the controversial tactics being used for mass deportation.
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