Incoming acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte’s family has had extensive ties over two generations to leaders and financial backers of a secretive Christian organization that conducts shadow diplomacy around the world, according to public records and documents I obtained.
Pulte’s grandfather, at one point one of the wealthiest men in the world, built a Fortune 500 company and gave tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars to charity before his 2018 death. He was also friends with Doug Coe, died in 2017 after decades leading the secretive, controversial Fellowship Foundation that built and sustained a global right-wing network including dictators, lobbyists, and corrupt millionaires largely united against labor, LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights.
Better known as The Family, The Fellowship runs the National Prayer Breakfast and the congressional residence on Capitol Hill called C Street.
Pulte’s father, Mark, like others of the patriarch’s progeny, has kept a hand in the grandfather’s work, including funding religious charities with Fellowship ties.
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It’s not clear whether Pulte’s grandfather, after whom he’s named, passed on any of his Fellowship relationships to his grandson.
If Pulte is personally connected to The Fellowship, he’d hardly be alone in the administration’s upper ranks.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio used to live at the C Street townhouse, as did Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.). President Donald Trump’s special envoy to the United Kingdom, former “Apprentice” producer Mark Burnett, is a regular at The Fellowship’s National Prayer Breakfast.
That said, I found no public indication that Pulte has direct, personal ties to The Fellowship. Coe died in 2017 and even before that, Pulte’s philanthropy focused primarily on giving cash to individuals rather than charities pushing the theocratic vision common among Fellowship recipients.
But Pulte also claimed to have been uniquely close to his grandfather, Coe’s close friend.
It’s not surprising that the Pulte family, based in Michigan, has ties to Fellowship insiders and funders. The Fellowship has had a strong presence among Michigan’s wealthy for decades.
But the ties extend beyond overlapping at religious charities in the orbits of Michigan philanthropists. Pulte had a significant personal relationship with Coe, who hobnobbed with presidents of both parties and leaders of nations around the world.
A 2019 tribute after the elder Pulte’s death, in a publication of one of his charities, said:
“Bill had a global vision rooted in his deep faith in Jesus Christ. He connected his vision and faith, joining with other philanthropists and leaders (including former President George W. Bush in Washington, D.C. for prayer breakfasts where they prayed together for world peace.”
In an interview just last month, Rabbi Jack Bemporad recalled “we used to go to Doug’s place,” presumably referring to Coe’s Arlington, Va., home.
Bemporad was a collaborator with the elder Pulte on a project of profound personal importance: Crafting a prayer for peace so universal it would foster world peace. (It has yet to achieve progress toward this aim.)
Coe assembled a group of eight to craft it, so the finished prayer would be inclusive enough to be universally unifying. (The group is pictured in the screengrab at the top of this article.)
The tallest figure, to Pulte’s immediate right, is A. Larry Ross, a Fellowship spokesperson and past board member. Ross was one of the key figures I identified a few years ago as part of The Fellowship’s radicalization of Mike Lindell.
The smiling group of eight at some point found themselves at odds with each other over their unifying prayer.
The ties extend beyond overlapping at religious charities in the orbits of Michigan philanthropists. Pulte had a significant personal relationship with Coe, who hobnobbed with presidents of both parties and leaders of nations around the world.
According to Bemporad in his interview last month, the elder Pulte took his idea for a prayer to Clark Durant, an occasional Republican candidate and former vice president at Hillsdale College, an oasis for theocratic right-wing academia. Durant brought in Coe. Coe brought in the others.
Some on the team of eight felt the prayer should be Christian. Pulte and Bemporad, the rabbi, did not, Bemporad says. “[T]hat was something that divided us.”
They worked on it for more than a year, with weekly prayer group meetings. (You can read the final prayer at Bemporad’s website.)
Whatever divide arose between Coe and Pulte apparently wasn’t deep or permanent.
Fellowship spreadsheets I obtained several years ago list Pulte as attending the 2015 and 2016 prayer breakfasts, one year with his wife.
The 2016 spreadsheet identifies who invited each guest, and the Pultes were invited by Coe.
Back home, Pulte’s circle included another Coe disciple, a Michigan business leader named Mike Timmis, who facilitated Fellowship mission work known as Cornerstone Development in Uganda. The Fellowship liaison backed by Timmis helped lead a parliamentary prayer group that ultimately enacted the death penalty for LGBTQ+ people there.
Timmis and Pulte helped get Cornerstone Schools off the ground in Michigan in the early 1990s. Durant, who knew Coe, approached both of them for help.
The 1991 articles of incorporation list Durant, Timmis, and Timmis’s wife as incorporators. Timmis and Durant raised $1.2 million. Pulte kicked in the final $22 million, according to a story told by Mark Pulte.
The elder Pulte, Mark’s father and grandfather of the incoming acting intelligence director, poured “tens of millions” into the schools over the years, reportedly. (He also sold a home to Timmis’s son — another disciple of Coe’s — after building a development in Ave Maria, Fla., when Timmis’s son chaired the board of Ave Maria University.)
By ten years in, The Fellowship itself had begun donating to the schools, tax records show. The Fellowship’s 2002 tax filing shows $2,000 going to Cornerstone Schools.
In 2003, someone at The Fellowship appears to have confused Timmis’s Cornerstone Schools in Detroit with Timmis’s Cornerstone Development in Uganda. Another $2,000 is listed for Cornerstone Schools that year “to assist the inner city schools in Uganda,” which is what Cornerstone Schools does in Detroit and Cornerstone Development does not do in Uganda’s inner-city schools.
By 2005, the regular $2,000 Fellowship donation to Cornerstone Schools in Detroit was back. And by 2012, two generations of Pultes were involved. Bill Pulte’s father, Mark, appears on the board that year.
Outside of Michigan, there’s little sign of Pulte family financial involvement in Fellowship endeavors. Pulte’s grandmother, who’s still living, has donated reliably to Republican political campaigns, but her only notable Fellowship recipient is Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI), who got $1,000 in 2010, years before The Fellowship flew him to Uganda to bolster allies there under international pressure for their LGBTQ+ death penalty.
Pulte the grandson hasn’t donated to any prominent Fellowship candidates. If anything, the younger Pulte’s donations veer more toward the bombastic right. There’s a distinct gap between grandfather and grandson donations.
The older, ecumenical Fortune 500 billionaire donated more than $30,000 in 2012 to committees supporting Mitt Romney. They were his last. The next donation by a William Pulte came in 2019, when only the grandson of that name was left. He gave $35,000 to the Trump Victory committee.
There is one intriguing thread that leads to a largely invisible Fellowship leader said to be influential with Michigan Republicans and, allegedly, unnamed Democrats.
In his 2022 book, Timmis wrote about a Fellowship associate named Charles McLeod. “He is responsible for bringing reconciliation to the Democrats and Republicans in the Michigan legislature and in the US Congress,” Timmis wrote.
In practice this suggests that McLeod doesn’t have what most workers would recognize as a real job. Supported by unnamed donors, he offers encouragement and religious-based morale boosts to politicians or their mutual benefactors.
As I’ve written before, McLeod is connected to Rep. John Moolenaar (R-MI). Moolenaar said in 2024 that McLeod, Coe, and Timmis taught him “this idea of devoting my life as a follower of Jesus, his teachings, to being available for his purposes.”
That puts McLeod at the heart of The Fellowship’s Michigan nexus.
The Pulte connection to McLeod is a charity called Angels’ Place. Pulte and his wife began supporting it in the early 1990s. Multiple Pultes have served on the board and the family foundation continues to support it.
The Fellowship, too, has donated to Angels’ Place. More to the point, the address The Fellowship listed for Angels’ Place in a 2007 tax filing was McLeod’s home address. That address has also shown up in Michigan obituaries advising mourners how to donate to The Fellowship on behalf of the deceased. (McLeod’s wife, too, has been a paid associate of The Fellowship, according to federal campaign disclosure forms.)
Whoever’s supporting McLeod’s activities — whatever they might be other than supposedly bringing reconciliation to Republicans and Democrats — they appear to have money to spare.
In 2003, McLeod’s patrons funneled more than $100,000 through The Fellowship to compensate him. In 2024, the most recent year for which tax forms are available, McLeod was paid $180,507, making him The Fellowship’s highest-paid associate.
Bill Pulte, the 38-year-old now prepping to run America’s entire intelligence community, doesn’t have any direct connections I could find to Pulte, Timmis, or other Fellowship leaders or organizations. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) did not respond to a request for comment.
But, especially in Pulte’s new position, The Fellowship could be just a phone call away, given its intense focus on relationships with global leaders, and given Pulte’s ostensible closeness to his grandfather. The Fellowship already has a history of working with and inside the State Department.
That closeness between grandson and grandfather became public as part of an extraordinary battle over the leadership of the Pulte patriarch’s company, after he had stepped aside.
The Pultes were pissed when new leadership began moving the company out of Michigan, to Georgia, in 2013. That’s what multiple business outlets reported in 2016, when the elder Pulte, grandson tagging along, tried to push out the company’s president.
What the business press didn’t report was the timing of another issue much tighter than the three-year lag after the move.
In mid-March of 2016, Pulte Homes (now PulteGroup) President and CEO Richard Dugas was taking a public stand on religious freedom. Against it, it might appear to some on the right.
Dugas spoke out against a state bill to allow discrimination on the basis of religious beliefs, according to an article in Atlanta’s Saporta Report on March 17, 2016.
Four days later, Pulte summoned Dugas to a meeting. To Dugas’s surprise, Pulte had brought his grandson. The press release from the board about their meeting didn’t say anything about religious freedom. It was all about the move to Georgia and various other simmering issues. It didn’t explain the timing.
Then, on April 4, 2016, Pulte wrote to the board, seeking to push Dugas out.
It’s possible the religion bill had nothing to do with it. The senior Pulte, after all, had for decades worked ecumenically with a wide variety of people.
On the other hand, The Fellowship, too, celebrates diversity — sometimes via lip service — while simultaneously advancing the conceit of a legal or moral right to discriminate based on religion.
Whatever the cause, the turf war churned up inside information about Pulte and his grandson.
The younger Pulte alleged in one suit that, out of his grandfather’s 39 heirs across two generations, he was the only one “recruited” to work in the company and “the only descendant to receive an inheritance from his grandfather.”
The suit also claimed that the elder Pulte was for years “a valued member” of his grandson’s venture-capital firm. And that the two partnered to combat urban blight in Detroit and elsewhere, “a project he [Pulte] started with his Grandfather.”
His grandfather, Pulte said in 2021, was also “very involved” in his countertop company.
The following year, Pulte even produced a slim volume annotating some of his grandfather’s sayings and quotations. Some of Pulte’s annotations might give pause to those already worried about him overseeing America’s intelligence community.
“What he [Pulte’s grandfather] showed us was that it’s almost impossible to get something a [sic] 100%, but if you have 80%, you can get a lot done in life. You really want to focus on getting 80% done, considering it done, and 8 times out of 10, you are going to win.”
– The Home that Bill Pulte Built
William J. Pulte & William J. Pulte
Three years later, Pulte seems to have rejected fully some of his grandfather’s principles.
“Humility is a sign of self-confidence,” he wrote in 2022, three years before joining the Trump administration. “Humble leaders can accomplish more than egotistical leaders.” Pulte has not publicly advanced this principle recently.
At other points in the book one can spot glimpses of Pulte’s coming transition from a Pulte grandson to a Trump mercenary.
“What actions can we take today that are genuine, good, whole, and abiding by God that can result in good outcomes instead of hate-filled vindictiveness?” wrote Pulte, yet to become famous attacking Trump’s enemies, with bad outcomes.
This was in response to his grandfather’s quotation: “You can never succeed when you have hate on your mind.” The grandson added a caveat that effectively rejected the late patriarch’s thinking.
The exception that Pulte claimed may have come in handy later, while serving Trump. “I think there’s something to be said, and I know he would agree, which is if somebody hit you, you got to hit him back.”
One accusation revealed in Pulte’s suit may resonate today, as even Republicans recoil at Pulte’s utter lack of experience relevant to overseeing America’s sprawling intelligence community.
A former PulteGroup board member told the Detroit Free Press in 2021 that many board members “didn’t think his experience was extensive enough” when his grandfather installed Pulte on the board. After his grandfather died, Pulte was kicked off the board.
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At the time, Pulte told the newspaper he wasn’t interested in politics.
“I tell people, don’t bait me into politics,” he said. “I stay apolitical for everything I’m doing right now.”
The cover of his book touts his grandfather’s credo of God first and family second. But today Pulte is known for putting Trump first, ginning up prosecutions against officials who sought to hold Trump accountable. None have yet borne fruit.
And while Pulte’s star rises — for however long it lasts — Trump’s presidency has hit his family and the charitable endeavors his grandfather built.
In March of last year, two months into Trump’s second term, Mark Pulte discussed how the family’s Pulte Institute for Global Development at Notre Dame goes to Washington to “educate our government how they can make the world a better place, where their foreign aid money should be going, where it shouldn’t be going.”
The institute works with governments and private entities to fight poverty and improve health and education. A month after the interview, Trump funding cuts forced the institute to lay off two thirds of its staff.
Update: Substacker Greg Conners spotted an eyebrow-raising early intersection between Trump world and the Pulte family.
The notorious bidding war for a Palm Beach estate between Trump and Jeffrey Epstein involved a third party. It was Mark Pulte, who veered off from the Pulte home-building business to focus on luxury properties. As Connor notes, Pulte, father of Trump’s appointee, outbid Epstein and was the one who actually bid up the price Trump ended up paying.
This post originally ran on Jonathan Larsen’s Substack. Read the original post here.
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