Trump said Bill Pulte will serve only temporarily as acting director of national intelligence after the appointment drew Republican criticism over his lack of intelligence experience. The president defended Pulte as smart and said the administration is interviewing other candidates.
Posts tagged as “the Office of the Director of National Intelligence”
President Trump named FHFA Director Bill Pulte as acting director of national intelligence, succeeding Tulsi Gabbard at the end of June. Pulte will keep his housing agency roles while taking over the intelligence office temporarily.
David Rush, a former CIA officer, was arrested after FBI agents found over $40 million in gold bars at his home. He faces charges of criminal theft of public money and falsifying his educational and military background.
The U.S. intelligence community has released a 10-page declassified report on the origins of Covid-19, finding no direct evidence of a "biosafety incident" at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and that natural exposure to an infected animal is the most likely scenario for the first human infection. The report also noted that the intelligence community has not seen evidence that the virus was released from the Wuhan Institute of Virology intentionally or accidentally, and that the Chinese government has not been fully transparent in its response to the pandemic.
The U.S. intelligence community has seen a significant drop in the number of searches for Americans’ information collected under a warrantless surveillance program, according to a government report released Friday. The report found that the number of searches dropped from more than 3.4 million in 2021 to just over 204,000 in 2022, following changes adopted by the FBI in the summer of 2021. The ODNI report is the latest in a series of steps taken by the U.S. intelligence community to increase transparency and oversight of its surveillance activities.
President Joe Biden has signed a bipartisan bill that directs the federal government to declassify intelligence related to the origins of Covid-19. The bill calls for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to declassify information related to China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology and requires a report to Congress within 180 days. It is hoped that the declassified intelligence will help to resolve the debate over the source of the virus and provide more clarity on the public health response.
The US Department of Energy has concluded with "low confidence" that the Covid-19 pandemic "likely" originated from a laboratory leak in Wuhan, China, according to a classified report delivered to key lawmakers on the House and Senate Intelligence Committees. Intelligence agencies can make assessments with either low, medium or high confidence, but one source cautioned that the DOE's conclusion was not being viewed as hugely significant due to interagency disagreements. The US Department of Energy's assessment is the latest in a series of reports from the US government and other countries that have sought to determine the origin of the Covid-19 pandemic.