Party Time at the ODNI?

Party Time at the ODNI? Christina Norton’s social media photos, now made private, show the new far-right ODNI chief of staff partying around DC and boasting about her GOP “election integrity” work Christina A. Norton, the new chief of staff of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), is a party-loving MAGA activist with no background in national security issues but who last year boasted of running “the largest election integrity operation the Republican Party has ever seen,” according to copies of some of her past Instagram posts that she quickly made private this past weekend after being tapped for her new, high profile role by Acting National Intelligence Director Bill Pulte. SpyTalk obtained a copy of Norton’s now private posts from a source who took screen shots of them before they were removed from public viewing. Some of them show a dressed-for-cocktails Norton partying and dancing with friends on Capitol Hill. Others show her attending a baby shower in Palm Beach and in one case playing the piano in a trim white outfit. But one of those posts—in which she talks about supervising more than 200,000 Republican poll watchers “standing guard” at polling booths and vote-counting stations across the country—is likely to stoke fears that Pulte’s real agenda as intelligence chief is to use his post to create enough doubts about the 2026 election to justify intervention at the polls by the Trump administration. (An ODNI official denied any such intentions. “There are no plans on elections,” the official said.) Like Pulte himself, Norton is a political partisan who has held no positions that would have required her to get a security clearance or deal with any intelligence or national security issues. Most recently, she worked for Pulte at the Federal Housing Finance Agency, as vice president of operations and public relations. Her Linkedin account, deleted suddenly on Sunday after SpyTalk made inquiries about her job experience, showed she previously served for two years as the Republican National Committee’s director of its “election integrity department” (where campaign reports show she earned $9,216 a month during the 2024 election cycle) and before that as the deputy executive director and political director of the Republican National Lawyers Association (although her Linkedin account did not list her as having attended law school). As a student at the University of Central Florida, her profile showed, she was chair of College Republicans. Her account did not list her age. Norton called her service as director of the RNC election integrity office “the honor of a lifetime,” according to remarks she posted on Instagram in August, 2025 when she was inducted into the Young Republicans 1856 Society, a group known for hard-right activism. (In 2024, Norton, in her role as election integrity director, was a featured speaker at an online event for GOP poll watchers hosted by allies of prominent MAGA conspiracy theorist and MyPillow magnate Mike Lindell.) “We recruited and trained over 230,000 poll watchers and poll workers across 18 battleground states,” Norton said in her remarks to the Young Republicans group about the activities during the 2024 campaign. “That meant for the first time in history, a Republican was standing guard to ensure the law was followed in every single precinct and mail ballot center in every major city across every battleground.” (The New York Times reported that one of those who spoke to poll workers under Norton’s program was Jack Posobiec, a fringe MAGA influencer and election denialist who is principally known for spreading “Pizzagate,” the conspiracy theory that young children were being sexually abused in the basement of a popular Washington DC pizza parlor.) Throughout her comments, Norton echoed positions that President Trump has invoked to win passage of his controversial SAVE America Act, which would require prospective voters to show citizenship papers in order to cast ballots. The tenuous connection between the ODNI’s fate and “election integrity” was highlighted by Trump himself two weeks ago when, after nominating Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, to succeed Tulsi Gabbard as DNI, the president swiftly pulled back the nomination and cancelled Clayton’s confirmation hearing saying passage of the SAVE American Act had to come first. Pulte, a former housing company executive, may well serve to the limit of his 120-day term, as Senate Democrats have vowed to filibuster the SAFE ACT, which they view as a blatant “voter suppression” bill. Ballot Watch Concerns that Pulte might be under orders to find and invoke vague classified intelligence about possible foreign interference to cast a cloud over potential Democratic wins in November were first prompted by erstwhile DNI Tulsi Gabbard’s extraordinary decision last January to fly down to Fulton County, Ga. during an FBI search of 2020 election ballots. Gabbard had suggested that she was doing so because there might somehow have been foreign meddling in that vote count, although a later release of the FBI affidavit justifying the search relied on long discredited theories of election interference—with no mention of any foreign involvement. Norton’s remarks at the Young Republican induction ceremony could well heighten those concerns. She said that, while running the RNC election integrity department, she had filed nearly 140 lawsuits to challenge voting procedures across the country. “We forced states to clean up their voter rolls and stopped states like New York from allowing non-citizens to vote,” Norton said. She also boasted of having worked “in defense of voter ID laws, took on unlawful ballot harvesting, and protected regulations on drop boxes.” And she thanked “everyone who supported the President’s mission & restored voter confidence back into our nation’s elections.” “We recruited and trained over 230,000 poll watchers and poll workers across 18 battleground states,” Norton said in her remarks to the Young Republicans group about the activities during the 2024 campaign. The news of Norton’s appointment, coming just two days after Pulte fired more than 50 intelligence officials and analysts, including senior national intelligence officers for Russia-Ukraine, China, and East Asia, sent new alarm bells through ODNI headquarters in northern Virginia. “As soon as the word got out [on Norton’s appointment] my phone lit up with people saying, ‘Oh My God,’” one ODNI veteran told SpyTalk. “It was clear there was shock and awe. This sends a message that [under Pulte] it’s all about election integrity.” Norton did not respond to a request for comment. The ODNI official SpyTalk talked with declined to elaborate on Norton’s remarks or why her past experience as a Republican “election integrity” official qualified her to serve as chief of staff for an office that oversees the work of the entire U.S. intelligence community’s 17 agencies. The official did say that both Pulte and Norton have full security clearances, “which are not interim,” but declined to explain where or how they got them so quickly Many of the Instagram posts obtained by SpyTalk show Norton enjoying an active social life in Washington DC and Palm Beach, Florida. In several of them, she can be seen partying and dancing with a group of young Republican women on Capitol Hill. The photos were taken as part of an annual gathering of young MAGA activists, where “they go to different bars and take Instagram photos of themselves,” said a source familiar with the regular event. “She’s definitely in tight with the MAGA crowd.” “The best night of the year,” Norton wrote underneath one of the photos.