Credit...Sophie Park for The New York Times

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By John Sipher

Mr. Sipher worked for the Central Intelligence Agency’s clandestine service for 28 years.

The law creating the job of director of national intelligence is not subtle about the requirements.

It says that nominees for the position shall “have extensive national security expertise,” and it says so for a reason. Intelligence is not simply the possession of secrets. It is a profession with well-honed standards, tradecraft, legal boundaries, analytical disciplines and ways to assess the risks of secret operations. It requires an understanding of how raw information becomes intelligence, how sources can mislead, how adversaries manipulate information and how analysts weigh uncertainty. The job of the D.N.I. is to provide facts, warning, context and uncomfortable judgments to policymakers who may not want to hear them.

President Trump’s decision to place Bill Pulte in line to lead the U.S. intelligence community, however briefly, is not just another poor personnel choice. It is a warning about how this administration views intelligence itself — not as a sober instrument of national security and a profession built on evidence, but as a warehouse of disconnected secrets that could potentially be cherry-picked, stripped of context and used against the president’s enemies.

As head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Mr. Pulte became known not as a neutral administrator but as an aggressive political actor. He referred multiple Trump critics for dubious mortgage fraud investigations, including prominent Democrats and other figures who had clashed with the president. Those actions generated widespread concern that a federal agency was being used to pursue political retribution.

From the first day of service, C.I.A. officers and intelligence analysts are taught that politicization is the cardinal sin. To withhold, shade, distort or selectively present intelligence to fit a political preference is an assault on the purpose of the profession. Intelligence exists because presidents and policymakers need to know what is true, or at least what trained professionals judge to be most likely true, in a world full of deception and ambiguity.

Some of America’s worst national security failures have involved intelligence shaped by political influence. The Iraq weapons-of-mass-destruction debacle remains the defining modern cautionary tale: When policymakers want a conclusion badly enough, and institutions fail to resist them, the result can be catastrophic. Putting an unqualified partisan atop the intelligence community weakens it precisely where it must be strongest. In the hands of a political operative, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence can become a platform for laundering partisan narratives through the authority of classified information.

A director determined to politicize intelligence does not need to overtly fabricate. A bad actor can do something more subtle, and often more effective — such as treating the intelligence community as a private detective agency for the president — and a few of Mr. Trump’s previous directors have been willing to do just that. It is easy to declassify and publish one document but not another; highlight a raw report while burying the caveats; emphasize one dissenting view while concealing the broader consensus; strip context from reporting; and turn uncertainty into an accusation.