Inside Trump Cabinet official’s ties to shadowy evangelical group

President Donald Trump continues to draw a great deal of criticism on both the left and the right for picking Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) Director Bill Pulte for acting national intelligence director despite his lack of national security experience. But Trump considers Pulte a true MAGA loyalist. And according to Salon, he has another credential that makes him appealing to MAGA: his family's connection to The Family, a secretive Christian group that has been active in Washington, DC for 91 years.

Journalist Jonathan Larsen, in Salon, reports that Pulte's family "has had extensive ties over two generations to leaders and financial backers" of the Fellowship Foundation, AKA The Family — which "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," Larsen reports. "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."

The Family was formed in 1935 during the Great Depression by Abraham Vereide, a native of Norway. Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was serving his first term at the time, and The Family was decidedly opposed to FDR's New Deal. Although Vereide was a Methodist/Mainline Protestant minister, evangelicals have become increasingly prominent in The Family over the years.

Larsen notes that he "found no public indication that Pulte has direct, personal ties to The Fellowship," but members of his family clearly do.

"If Pulte is personally connected to The Fellowship," Larsen explains, "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….

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, 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."

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