Hillary Clinton went on a Democratic legal operative's podcast and openly encouraged federal employees inside America's intelligence agencies to obstruct the man President Trump appointed to lead them. The former secretary of state expressed her "hope" that career staffers and even political appointees would slow-walk or outright refuse to share classified information with Acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte, Just the News reported.
Let that settle for a moment. A former top diplomat, someone who once held one of the highest security clearances in the U.S. government, is publicly rooting for bureaucratic sabotage of a sitting president's intelligence chief.
Clinton appeared on the Democracy Docket podcast hosted by Marc Elias, the Democratic elections lawyer who has built a cottage industry around progressive legal challenges. During the interview, Elias asked Clinton about her concerns regarding Trump's decision to replace Tulsi Gabbard with Pulte at the helm of the intelligence community. Clinton did not hold back.
She characterized Pulte as "very dangerous" and a "loose cannon," and called his appointment "deeply insulting to the intelligence community," noting he has no intelligence experience. Then she went further, laying out what amounts to an invitation to insubordination.
"I mean, I hope there are career and even political appointees in various of the agencies that are slow-walking or refusing to share information with Pulte."
Clinton also stressed the breadth of access the DNI position carries.
"The DNI has access to everything, everything that they want to see."
That second quote makes the first one worse, not better. Clinton is simultaneously arguing that the DNI role is extraordinarily powerful, and that unelected federal employees should decide on their own to cut the DNI out of the loop. The logical conclusion of her position is that career bureaucrats, not the elected president, should determine who gets to see America's most sensitive secrets.
This is not the first time Clinton has positioned herself against the intelligence community's chain of command when it suited her political interests. Former DNI John Ratcliffe revealed intelligence showing that Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign "was creating a plan to vilify Donald Trump [and] to falsely accuse him of ties to Russia," as the New York Post reported. Ratcliffe stated that Obama, Biden, CIA Director John Brennan, and the broader national security team were all briefed on the alleged plan.
Clinton's willingness to weaponize intelligence community relationships for political ends is, by now, well documented. That she would encourage federal employees to defy their own leadership fits a long pattern of treating the national security apparatus as a political instrument, useful when it serves her, disposable when it doesn't.
Gabbard stepped down as intelligence chief last month, and President Trump moved quickly to install Pulte as acting director. Clinton's objection centers on Pulte's lack of intelligence community experience. That is a legitimate policy argument, one that senators, commentators, and former officials can and should debate through proper channels.
But Clinton did not stop at criticism. She leaped past debate and straight into encouraging defiance of lawful authority. There is a significant difference between arguing that a nominee is unqualified and telling government employees to withhold information from their boss.
Consider the double standard at work. Clinton and her allies spent years arguing that Trump undermined democratic norms. They warned about threats to institutional integrity. They insisted that the intelligence community must be respected and protected from political interference.
Now Clinton is asking those same institutions to engage in exactly the kind of political interference she once decried, only this time, the interference serves her side. Career employees who take her advice would be substituting their own political judgment for the constitutional authority of the president to appoint and direct his intelligence leadership. That is not whistleblowing. That is insubordination dressed up as principle.
Clinton's broader credibility on matters of institutional accountability continues to erode. The House Oversight Committee voted in bipartisan fashion to hold both Bill and Hillary Clinton in contempt of Congress for defying subpoenas related to the Jeffrey Epstein investigation. Nine Democrats joined Republicans in that vote. Rep. James Comer stated plainly: "I fully expect the Trump Department of Justice to hold them accountable."
A former official who is herself facing a bipartisan contempt finding for refusing to comply with congressional subpoenas is now encouraging other government employees to refuse to comply with their own chain of command. The irony writes itself.
Clinton's framing assumes that career intelligence professionals know better than the president whom to trust with classified material. But the DNI exists precisely to coordinate intelligence across agencies under presidential authority. If individual analysts or mid-level appointees can decide on their own to withhold information from the director, the entire structure collapses into a system where unelected officials exercise veto power over elected leadership.
That is not how a constitutional republic works. The president appoints the DNI. The Senate confirms, or, in the case of an acting appointment, the president exercises temporary authority under existing law. Federal employees serve the office, not the person they wish held it.
Clinton's comments also raise practical national security concerns. Intelligence gaps do not just embarrass political appointees. They leave the country exposed. If analysts in "various of the agencies" take Clinton's advice and begin selectively filtering what reaches the acting DNI's desk, the person responsible for briefing the president on threats to the homeland would be operating with an incomplete picture. The downstream risk falls on every American.
The debate over intelligence community leadership is legitimate and ongoing. Reasonable people can disagree about qualifications, experience requirements, and management style. But that debate belongs in Senate hearings, oversight committees, and public discourse, not in whispered encouragement to defy lawful authority.
Clinton's choice of venue matters. Marc Elias is not a neutral interviewer. He runs Democracy Docket, a platform built around progressive election litigation and legal strategy. The audience for these remarks is not the general public, it is the activist infrastructure of the Democratic Party. Clinton was speaking to the people most likely to have connections inside federal agencies and most motivated to act on her suggestion.
Questions remain about Clinton's broader political trajectory. She has publicly called Biden's reelection bid a "terrible mistake" and has continued to position herself as a senior voice in Democratic politics despite holding no office. Her willingness to make increasingly aggressive public statements, from criticizing her own party's presidential strategy to encouraging federal employees to obstruct the current administration, suggests someone operating without institutional constraints or accountability.
Meanwhile, serious questions about how the Clintons accumulated their wealth during and after public service continue to circulate. None of this context makes Clinton's latest remarks illegal. But it does frame them. A former official under bipartisan contempt proceedings, with her own complicated history involving the intelligence community, is now telling federal employees to undermine the president's chosen intelligence director.
Neither Pulte nor the White House has publicly responded to Clinton's remarks, at least not in available reporting. That may change. What will not change is the underlying principle at stake.
Federal employees take an oath to the Constitution, not to Hillary Clinton's preferences. The president has the authority to appoint his intelligence leadership. Career professionals who disagree with that choice have every right to resign, to testify before Congress, or to use lawful whistleblower channels. They do not have the right to selectively withhold classified information from their lawful superior because a former politician told them to on a podcast.
Clinton knows this. She ran the State Department. She managed classified information, sometimes controversially. She understands chain of command, institutional authority, and the consequences of unauthorized information handling. Her decision to encourage exactly the kind of conduct she once would have punished in her own employees is not a lapse. It is a choice.
And it tells you everything about where her priorities actually lie: not with the intelligence community, not with national security, and certainly not with the constitutional order she claims to defend, but with the political outcome she wants, by whatever means necessary.
When a former secretary of state openly roots for bureaucratic sabotage of the intelligence community, the problem is not the new director. The problem is the person behind the microphone.
