Roger Stone pushed for Trump to bring “longtime friend” Bill Pulte into his administration – and now wants the acting DNI to investigate “that 2020 election”

Stone used his radio show to suggest Pulte’s goal as DNI is “the big enchilada, that 2020 election,” and reporting from Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan found that Stone “squired Pulte around Mar-a-Lago during the 2024 transition”

Written by Noah VanDowe

Published

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Melissa Joskow / Media Matters

On his radio show, notorious political operative and Trump confidant Roger Stone has touted his friendship with acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte, celebrating that he thinks Pulte will use his position to investigate voter fraud and “finally reveal what really happened in the 2020 election.”

In their new book, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan reported that Stone — once kept at a distance from the White House — has taken a greater role in Trump’s second term in office, including helping connect the president with Pulte.

Most of Trump’s first-term aides despised him [Stone], and he was held at an even greater distance in term one amid the Russia conspiracy investigation. Trump would give Stone—who used the phrase “Stop the Steal” in 2016 and maintained that 2020 was “rigged”—a last-minute pardon in January 2021. But Stone never visited the White House in that term.

Stone’s access changed during the 2024 campaign. Susie Wiles and other top Trump campaign advisors had their own long-standing relationships with Stone. They believed he was smart and saw him as a victim of the same DOJ “weaponization” that Trump had complained about. … The fights and rapprochements between Trump and Stone over forty years were almost impossible to track. But at the end of the day, Trump always came back to Roger Stone. In his second term, he stopped pretending otherwise.

Stone’s counsel was taken up by Trump on a number of occasions — the book reports that he pushed the president to select Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence and “advocated relentlessly” for a pardon of former Honduran president and convicted drug trafficker Juan Orlando Hernández. According to Haberman and Swan, Stone also “squired Pulte around Mar-a-Lago during the 2024 transition.”

Enter Bill Pulte. An heir to a homebuilding fortune, Pulte had come to Trump’s notice in 2019 with some favorable tweets; he was also a Trump donor, and he had later connected with Roger Stone, who squired Pulte around Mar-a-Lago during the 2024 transition. Pulte had his eye on the position of secretary of housing and urban development, but he would ultimately accept the directorship of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), a low-profile office he would turn into a howitzer for Trump’s retribution agenda.

Building on this in-person effort to connect Pulte with the president, Stone has repeatedly used his radio show to promote Pulte after Trump named him to replace Gabbard as acting DNI.

On June 3, Stone called Pulte “extraordinarily capable” and “extraordinarily loyal to President Donald J. Trump” while slamming his critics in Congress as “unqualified to be in public office, in my opinion.” On June 5, Stone described Pulte as a “longtime friend of mine, someone I originally recommended for the job of Federal Housing Finance Administrator.” Stone further attacked Sens. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), Susan Collins (R-ME), and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) as “RINOs” for their support of a Democratic amendment which would have barred Pulte from serving as DNI while he also remains head of FHFA.

Stone was also clear about Pulte’s ultimate goal as DNI: Relitigating Trump’s 2020 election defeat with debunked claims of fraud.

“The big enchilada, that 2020 election,” Stone argued on June 3. “How is it that 81 million people voted for Joe Biden? How is it that more people voted in the state of Pennsylvania than are registered to vote? … How is it that 300,000 printed ballots that were supposedly mailed in, but had never been folded in half and thus were never mailed, popped in out of nowhere in Georgia, Detroit, and elsewhere, all at the same time?” He further gloated on June 5 that “the intelligence community is particularly hysterical” that Trump said Pulte may “get to the bottom of the truth regarding the 2020 elections,” adding, “If what the president says is true, that Pulte is going to finally reveal what really happened in the 2020 election, you can see why the Democrats are so scared.”

Pulte’s appointment to DNI was widely embraced by prominent election conspiracy theorists, including some who have pushed in recent months for Trump to declare a national emergency and seize “king-like powers” over the midterm elections. On June 10, War Room host and former Trump strategist Steve Bannon called Pulte the “perfect choice to run DNI right now,” suggesting he is there to “get to the bottom of the 2020 stolen election.” Conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec likewise hypothesized on June 17 that Pulte’s opponents are afraid he will expose “some kind of foreign interference or some kind of penetration of those election systems down there in Fulton County,” Georgia, which led to “a massive, massive problem with that 2020 count.”