National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster has sacked yet another member of the National Security Council today, with the White House announcing that the senior director for intelligence programs Ezra Cohen-Watnick has been removed from his position, with the requisite praising of his past service.
McMaster has had problems with Cohen-Watnick for awhile, trying to fire him back in March amid mounting complaints from CIA officials who didn’t like working with him. Cohen-Watnick was close with Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner, and Trump overruled McMaster on that last firing attempt.
Cohen-Watnick had been a favored aide to McMaster’s predecessor, Michael Flynn, and like other recently sidelined council members was a major hawk on Iran, having advocated using the US intelligence community to impose regime change.
This further adds to questions about the stability of the Trump Administration, which seems to be sloughing off appointees several times weekly these days, and increasingly at odds with one another on policy positions.
“…like other recently sidelined council members was a major hawk on Iran…”
Hey, good news for a change.
“like other recently sidelined council members was a major hawk on Iran, having advocated using the US intelligence community to impose regime change”
That is odd, because both McMaster and Mattis are often said to be advocates of that themselves. Are they really?
This is Morning Defense on the subject this A.M.
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MCMASTER CLEANS HOUSE AT THE NSC: “A
top official of the National Security Council was fired last month
after arguing in a memo that President Trump is under sustained attack
from subversive forces both within and outside the government who are
deploying Maoist tactics to defeat President Trump’s nationalist agenda.
“His dismissal marks the
latest victory by National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster in the ongoing
war within Trump’s White House between those who believe that the
president is under threat from dark forces plotting to undermine him,
and those like McMaster who dismiss this as conspiratorial thinking.
“Rich Higgins, a former
Pentagon official who served in the NSC’s strategic-planning office as a
director for strategic planning, was let go on July 21. Higgins’s memo
describes supposed domestic and international threats to Trump’s
presidency, including globalists, bankers, the ‘deep state,’ and
Islamists,” reports The Atlantic.
And McMaster also axes Ezra Cohen-Watnick, the NSC’s senior director for intelligence, add POLITICO’s Eliana Johnson, Nahal Toosi and Ali Watkins.”
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It is interesting that the Cohen-Watnick firing as stated as an afterthought to the Higgins filing (had anybody heard of this before?) and also that an attempt seems made to frame McMaster.
I smell Kushner.
McMaster is showing himself to be a doofus. He should be dumped with the weekend trash by President Trump.