WASHINGTON ― Bill Pulte has been on a firing spree in the weeks since President Donald Trump tapped him to be his acting director of national intelligence, but some of his past personnel choices are deeply questionable ― and his agency is threatening to sue reporters who cover it.
A wealthy housing executive with no experience in intelligence or national security, Pulte, a staunch ally to Trump, has fired dozens of intelligence officials and pushed out dozens more career and political staffers since the president put him into this role on June 19.
The only government experience Pulte has is at his other job atop the Federal Housing Finance Agency, where he’s been its director since March 2025. He’s been abusing this role to carry out retribution against Trump’s perceived political enemies, and a look at some of his hires there shows he’s made some highly problematic choices.
Last year, as Reuters exclusively reported in November, Pulte brought on Michigan restaurant owner Mark Zarkin as a consultant to mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Zarkin, a prominent Detroit-area Trump backer with no real experience in the mortgage sector, was convicted in 2000 of a felony sex crime involving a sexual encounter with a “mentally incapacitated” woman. He served time in jail and was listed on Michigan’s sex offender registry for about nine years, according to a 2019 investigation by the Detroit Free Press.
For unknown reasons, a judge later overturned his conviction in an “unusual” and “rare” case, as the Free Press put it.
On top of that, Zarkin is the subject, though not the defendant, of a June 2025 whistleblower lawsuit that alleges a local police chief was scheming with Zarkin to bribe Trump to pardon a New York associate convicted of banking fraud. The suit alleges that Zarkin and the police chief even traveled to Mar-a-Lago to meet with “high-profile millionaires” to make a deal.
This police chief was ultimately fired in September after an independent investigation found multiple legal and professional violations. The probe did not address the pardon-related scheme involving Zarkin, with investigators citing in their report “the inherent limitations on this internal investigation, as well as the possible involvement of law enforcement.”
The work Zarkin did as an FHFA consultant apparently involved him joining Pulte on visits to Fannie Mae offices and, in March 2025, escorting a film crew to these offices to shoot misleading footage about employees not coming to work, according to a December 2025 report by Reuters. That footage was later aired by Fox News.
Zarkin was no longer an FHFA consultant as of December 2025, per the Reuters report.
Asked for comment, an FHFA spokesperson claimed the Reuters story was wrong, that a different Mark Zarkin worked for FHFA, and that the agency was considering suing Reuters for defamation. They also suggested it would be defamation if HuffPost wrote this story.
“This Mark Zarkin was never an employee or consultant of FHFA and anything along those lines is defamatory,” the FHFA spokesperson told HuffPost.
The agency spokesperson did not respond to multiple requests for details about the other alleged Mark Zarkin who they claimed did work for FHFA.
It’s not clear why, if the Reuters story about Zarkin was incorrect, FHFA did not flag an error with it in the eight months that have passed since it was published. The Reuters story confirmed Zarkin had been hired as an FHFA consultant with six people familiar with the situation.
Zarkin declined to be interviewed for the Reuters story but sent a text message to the news outlet, stating, “I have never been employed by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. I also have no criminal record. Anything you say to the contrary is defamatory.”
“We stand by our reporting,” a Reuters spokesperson told HuffPost on Tuesday.
HuffPost tried Wednesday to contact Zarkin directly. A call to his cellphone went to voicemail and a full inbox. He did not respond to an email request for comment.
Right around the time Pulte brought on Zarkin, he also hired Aaron Kofsky, who four months earlier was fired from his job as a financial policy adviser with then-Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio).
Kofsky was the subject of an October 2024 WIRED story that revealed he’d been posting on Reddit under a pseudonym for nearly a decade about his use of cocaine, heroin, Ritalin, MDMA and other drugs. One of his posts mocked Vance as “a Trump book licker.” Another gave advice on how to transport drugs through TSA checkpoints at airports.
“Coke then opiates is always my go-to,” Kofsky said in one post. “I only speedball if I have enough opiates to redose when I’m out of blow.”
Vance reportedly suspended Kofsky the day the WIRED story came out, and weeks later, he was fired. Kofsky later lashed out at the publication for digging into his background, calling it absurd that journalists were “smearing an America First staffer.”
Kofsky was hired at FHFA in March 2025, at a time when the Trump administration was purging career staffers at the agency. He is currently listed as the senior associate director at the Federal Housing Finance Agency Division of Housing Mission and Goals.
The FHFA spokesperson did not provide a comment about Kofsky’s hire.
A spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence did not respond to a request for comment.
Pulte’s appointment to lead ODNI has drawn bipartisan criticism on Capitol Hill, where even conservative allies of Trump say a housing executive is the wrong person to lead this office, which oversees 18 federal intelligence agencies, including the CIA and the National Security Agency. Pulte didn’t even have a security clearance when Trump tapped him for this post.
“He’s not qualified for the long-term position; that’s been clear on this,” Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) said last month. “He has no national security background.”
Because Pulte is serving as acting director versus being confirmed by the Senate, he can only serve in the role for up to 210 days. Trump said last week he expects to keep Pulte in the role for a month or two, and has directed him to declassify “almost everything.”