Blunt appeared to deflect criticism that Grenell has never served in a U.S. intelligence agency by arguing that Joseph Maguire — the current acting director of national intelligence — took the job with similar levels of expertise. Maguire was confirmed as director of the National Counterterrorism Center in December 2018 and made acting intelligence chief in August 2019 after Dan Coats left the administration.

“He had just barely taken the other job and he had no more specific intel background than Grenell does,” Blunt said.

Senate Intelligence Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) has not commented on Grenell.

By naming another acting director, Trump will bypass a potentially difficult Senate confirmation fight. Democrats have ripped the choice of Grenell, who is known as a hard-edged Trump official, and vulnerable GOP senators may not have been eager to vote on the nomination.

“If there was any doubt that Donald Trump values unquestioning obedience over the safety of the American people, this appointment settles the question,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), an Intelligence Committee member.

“Sadly, President Trump has once again put his political interests ahead of America’s national security interests by appointing an Acting Director of National Intelligence whose sole qualification is his absolute loyalty to the President,” said Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Grenell emphasized on Twitter Thursday that he is in an acting role and said Trump will soon announce a nominee to be permanent director of national intelligence. Maguire was required by law to leave his acting post by March 12.

In Berlin, officials were jubilant at the news of Grenell’s new job. And then they found out he’d still remain as ambassador.

“It’s depressing,” said one veteran German diplomat who said Grenell’s wrecking ball approach had brought the German-American relationship to a standstill. Behind the scenes, Grenell has had little difficulty wielding Washington’s influence, whether on issues such as Iran or on energy policy.

But the tough love has come at a price — no one even wants to be seen with him. Grenell’s history of attacking Germany and his reputation as an avowed Trump partisan have prompted many senior politicians to avoid public meetings with him over concern the association could damage their standing with constituents.

Others say Grenell simply won’t be able to do both jobs at once.

“I don’t think that’s realistic at all,” said John Koenig, who served as chargé d’affaires ad interim and deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Berlin from 2006 to 2009. “Being ambassador to Germany is a full-time job. It’s really very demanding. So I really can’t see how you can do that difficult job and do the equally and more demanding job of being acting DNI at the same time.”

Another former senior U.S. official called it “an impossible balance.”

“The role of the director of national intelligence is a 24-7-365 job that is totally consuming, and when you’re overseeing 16 other agencies and trying to coordinate all the information that comes across their wires on an every-day basis is a 24 hour operation with shifts and so forth and so on,” said the official, adding that it was “quite shocking” to learn someone was selected with “no experience whatsoever in intelligence.”

Grenell will be based in Washington while serving as acting DNI, per two people familiar with situation. He had been planning to leave Germany for several months with the hopes of entering the private sector or potentially even joining the Trump campaign. And with Maguire’s term expiring, the White House did not have someone ready for a full time appointment. But they were aware of Grenell’s desire to come home in the near future and valued his loyalty to the president.

The White House is currently considering a few names to to be the permanent pick, and that person could be announced in the coming days.

A leading candidate is former Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.), according to an administration official.

Hoekstra, a former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, was confirmed by the Senate on a voice vote in 2017 to his current post as U.S. ambassador to the Netherlands, where he has won praise from Trump.

“He was a congressman for many, many years. He was on the Intel committee. He’s just got a good background,” said the official. “Maybe he would invite more scrutiny this time, but one would think that people have looked over his credentials and any potential trouble spots before.”

Blunt said in the interview that “Congress has a role” to vet nominees but blamed Democrats for trying to delay Trump picks and creating “an environment where the president doesn’t appreciate that role in ways that he otherwise might.”

“I hope we can move beyond this in the future, but I understand why the president at this moment might not want to get back into a situation that’s drug out by Democrats like they drug so many of these nominations out the first two years,” Blunt said.

Burgess Everett, Daniel Lippman, Andrew Desiderio, Meridith McGraw, Natasha Bertrand and Matthew Karnitschnig contributed to this report.

“Senator Warren’s position hasn’t changed. Since day one of this campaign, she has made clear that she thinks all of the candidates should lock arms together and say we don’t want super PACs and billionaires to be deciding our Democratic nominee,” Warren campaign spokesman Chris Hayden said in the statement.

The PAC’s arrival comes at a precarious time for Warren’s 2020 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, after a third-place finish in Iowa and a fourth-place finish in New Hampshire earlier this month. The Warren campaign trimmed its TV advertising in South Carolina recently in order to bolster its ad buy in Nevada.

And Persist PAC’s activity follows a glut of new outside spending in the Democratic race, after much of the field fought for months to keep big-spending outside groups at bay — before the realities of a tight race and stretched financial resources set in for those candidates’ allies.

Hayden’s statement about the new Persist PAC, contrasts with what the Warren campaign said in November, when an anonymously funded group bought advertisements in Iowa. At the time, the campaign called on the group to cease purchasing the ads. On Wednesday, the campaign stopped short of calling on Persist PAC to stop in its tracks.

Last November, Hayden said the “campaign was not aware of this and asks that those involved immediately stop purchasing advertisements of any kind. Elizabeth Warren believes democracy is undermined by anonymous, dark-money attempts to influence voters — whether that influence is meant to help or hurt her candidacy.”

Also this week, a super PAC supporting Sen. Amy Klobuchar — called Kitchen Table Conversations — began buying airtime in Nevada, and a secret-money group opposing Bernie Sanders starting running digital ads in South Carolina. They are joining super PACs backing Pete Buttigieg and Joe Biden, respectively, along with a Democratic pro-Israel group advertising against Sanders.

As recently last week, during the Democratic debate, Warren boasted about her and Klobuchar’s independence from super PACs.

“Except everyone on this stage, except Amy and me, is either a billionaire or is receiving help from PACs that can do unlimited spending. So if you really want to live where you say, then put your money where your mouth is and say no to the PACs,” Warren said during the debate.

Persist PAC is currently airing an ad focused on Warren’s time running the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau under President Barack Obama, which echoes some of the Warren campaign’s recent ads.

“When you don’t grow up rich, you learn how to work,” the ad’s narrator says. “When you take on Wall Street, you know how to fight.”

Nothing in Bloomberg’s wobbly debut suggested that an orthodox, mix-it-up-with-average-voters campaign in early, small states ever could have worked. His big-spending, glide-over-the-early-BS approach is the only one that likely could work for him.

Not surprisingly, this galls competitors. In particular, Bloomberg’s arrival—as well as the imminence of Super Tuesday on March 3 and its outsized consequences—seemed to summon something extra from former front-runner Elizabeth Warren. It was as if she said to herself, I am either going to come back strong or go down swinging with arguments that I genuinely believe.

Her performance was crisp and articulate, aggressive, often cutting, not just toward Bloomberg but at different junctures to every other rival.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, the person who is leading in polls for this week’s Nevada caucus, as well as some national polls, was only occasionally at the center of the evening’s drama. This was likely fine with him. He made familiar arguments in a familiar style, and nothing seemed likely to change the dynamic going into the evening: The Democratic contest likely has room for Sanders and one principal competitor, and the sprint now is to see who that competitor will be.

There was an arresting moment when Sanders bristled at Bloomberg’s assertion that Sanders’ policies have already been tried and found wanting: “It was called communism and it just didn’t work.” Sanders said, “That’s a cheap shot,” and said what he stands for is democratic socialism, not communism.

The primary attraction for the debate, hosted by NBC News, was a chance for people to see Bloomberg naked—no longer on TV commercials, dressed in the heroic garb of tycoon-turned-Cincinnatus ready to lay down his financial data terminal and pick up his sword against President Donald Trump.

By conventional political standards, the exposure was highly unflattering. He was put sharply on the defensive by those who said his recent apologies for his trademark “stop and frisk” policy as New York mayor came too late and glided over the true damage from their racially discriminatory impact. They scoffed at his refusal to say he would release women who worked at his media company from nondisclosure agreements they signed when settling sexual harassment and employment discrimination lawsuits against the firm. Bloomberg said the full records would show he personally had done nothing wrong “other than maybe they didn’t like a joke I told.”

On purely stylistic grounds, he was sometimes clear and precise—especially when speaking of his efforts to rally the country to combat climate change—but other times wandering and even inarticulate. He was prideful in ways not calculated to impress populist-minded Democrats (“Yes, I worked very hard for it,” when asked if it is fair that anyone has as many billions as he does). He was evasive on how long it will take until he releases his income taxes, a universal precedent in presidential politics until Trump broke it four years ago. (“Fortunately I make a lot of money….I can’t go to TurboTax.”) When challenged, he was dismissive in ways that, rather than projecting confidence, underscored defensiveness. In a clip that has gone viral, he was captured rolling his eyes at Warren when she was railing against his treatment of women.