Trump’s big weakness…personnel selection

TRUMP’S PERSONNEL SELECTIONS: SOME GOOD, SOME REALLY BAD…MANY UNFORTUNATELY FAILED TO LIVE UP TO THE IDEALS ON WHICH THEY WERE CHOSEN

In a thoughtful commentary, John Hinderaker at POWERLINE blog puts his two cents worth in regarding the Nikki Haley revelations about Former Trump Chief of Staff, John Kelly and former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.

Hinderaker, as we do, takes Ambassador Haley’s side on this one. In our case we never had the impression that Kelly and Tillerson were “pro-Trump”. Unfortunately, their behavior went well beyond “anti-Trump”…venturing onto the edges of treasonous territory.

We believe Ms. Haley’s account that these two tried to get her to join their desire to “overthrow” the president, or at least stall his agenda (“believing they were sAving the country”.)

Kelly and Tillerson make believable suspects as to the identity of “Anonymous”…another “savior of the country”, whose book is coming out, giving another inside story on just how “awful” Donald Trump is.

We have another one-time member of the White House ‘team’ we suspect even more so.

That would be former National security Advisor, H.R. McMaster.

And here, according to the 2017 “Conservative Review”, is all one needs to know about McMaster:

“National security adviser H.R. McMaster continues to purge conservatives from the ranks of the National Security Council”

Harvey was closely involved in president Trump’s efforts to rid the National Security Council of Obama holdovers, who were suspected of leaking national security secrets to the press. After extensive research, Harvey compiled a list of suspected leakers and reportedly delivered it straight to the president, who then took his list to McMaster.

Even though President Trump asked McMaster to fire the individuals on the list, the NSC chief refused the president’s directives to get rid of the Obama holdovers. This comes as Congress continues to sound the alarm about the national security implications of a White House that can’t control the release of classified information.

And as the classified leaks continue to spill into the public domain at a record-high rate, the National Security Council remains staffed with a shockingly high percentage of holdovers from the Obama era. Reached for comment, a White House official estimated that well over fifty percent of the National Security Council staff are Obama holdovers.

But instead of firing the Obama holdovers, McMaster has purged several conservative Trump supporters from the ranks of the NSC.

(Full Article appears beneath Hinderaker post)

Sadly, these are just three incredibly unscrupulous individuals who have served in the White House or other areas of the Trump administration. These are people who were entrusted to advise and/or carry out the policies of the duly elected president. Many of them were retained from the previous administration but were assumed by Mr. trump (perhaps naively) to be trustworthy and committed to the national interest .

Others were chosen by Trump and his team as accomplished, widely respected, highly reputable, faithful to the US Constitution. These three fit this characterization, but apparently failed dramatically to live up to the ideals they seemed to embody.
dlh
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Powerline, NOVEMBER 12, 2019 BY JOHN HINDERAKER
NIKKI HALEY, WHISTLEBLOWER

Nikki Haley has a book coming out about her experiences in the Trump administration. I think it will be interesting in many ways, but what has gotten the most press so far (based on advance copies received by the Washington Post and the Associated Press, two virulently anti-Trump and anti-Republican outlets) is her conflict with former Chief of Staff John Kelly and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. The Dallas Morning News reports:

Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is disputing a claim by Nikki Haley, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, that he sought to subvert President Donald Trump’s agenda in an effort to “save the country.”

Tillerson, a former ExxonMobil chief executive, told media outlets on Monday that during his tenure as America’s top diplomat, “at no time did I, nor to my direct knowledge did anyone else serving along with me, take any actions to undermine the president.”
***
That denial came after reports emerged that Haley, in her new book, said that Tillerson worked with former White House chief of Staff John Kelly to combat Trump’s decisions and that Haley rebuffed their efforts to join their cause.

“Kelly and Tillerson confided in me that when they resisted the president, they weren’t being insubordinate, they were trying to save the country,” Haley wrote in “With All Due Respect,” which is set to be released on Tuesday.

“It was their decisions, not the president’s, that were in the best interests of America, they said. The president didn’t know what he was doing,” she wrote, according to an advanced copy obtained on Sunday by The Washington Post.Tillerson went so far as to tell Haley that if he didn’t resist Trump’s decisions “people would die,” Haley wrote.

One can only wonder what foreign policies Tillerson had in mind. I suppose you could say about virtually any U.S. foreign policy decision that “people could die,” but Trump has been quite pacific and has committed no new troops to battle.

“To undermine a president is really a very dangerous thing,” she wrote, according to the Associated Press, which also obtained an advanced copy. “And it goes against the Constitution, and it goes against what the American people want. And it was offensive.”

Haley has embarked on an aggressive book tour, and she no doubt will have much more to say about her relations with Kelly, Tillerson and others. My guess is that Haley isn’t making this up.

Multiple morals could be drawn. Pending more information, it seems that some people who deem themselves smart and sophisticated, who watch the evening news and live in D.C., have succumbed to the anti-Trump Zeitgeist and have tried to distance themselves from the president. Some, like both Kelly and Tillerson, have been fired by Trump and therefore have aligned themselves, at least partially, with the Democratic Party Resistance. What is interesting about this particular instance is that neither John Kelly nor Rex Tillerson is a member of the “Deep State.”

Which means, I think, that this episode illustrates the power of the Deep State. Kelly and Tillerson are not members of the fraternity; on the contrary. But when they fell out with the president, they adopted the Deep State pretense of superiority toward the duly elected President of the United States and his voters. And in Washington, if they betray their former boss, they will be richly rewarded.

I am pretty sure I am on Haley’s side on this one. She, at least, has remained loyal to the president who hired her, rather than running after approval from the left-wing press.
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McMaster declares war on Trump loyalists, continues NSC purge

On Thursday, McMaster fired Col. Derek Harvey, a renowned Middle East expert who served under Gen. David Petraeus. Neither the White House nor the National Security Council gave a reason for Harvey’s firing.

Harvey is recognized in national security circles as a brilliant Middle East strategist. The Weekly Standard (which first reported Harvey’s firing) describes him as an “out-of-the-box thinker who has shown a keen knack for identifying threats before they’ve matured.” The report then cites a passage from Bob Woodward’s 2008 book “The War Within,” which delivers an intimate look into Harvey’s remarkable background:

In the late 1980s, Harvey traveled throughout Iraq by taxicab—500 miles, village to village—interviewing locals, sleeping on mud floors with a shower curtain for a door. He [was] full of questions, intensely curious and entirely nonthreatening. After the 1991 Gulf War, when the CIA was predicting the inevitable fall of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, Harvey, then a major, insisted that Hussein would survive because members of the Sunni community knew their fortunes were tied to his. He was right. Months before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Harvey wrote an intelligence paper declaring that al Qaeda and the Taliban leadership in Afghanistan posed a strategic threat to the United States.

In 2008, Gen. Jack Keane described Harvey as “hands down the very best intelligence analyst that the United States government has on Iraq.”

Harvey released a statement after his firing:

statement just in from Derek Harvey, fired today from NSC: pic.twitter.com/5mn1kBKk42

— Rosie Gray (@RosieGray) July 27, 2017

Harvey was closely involved in president Trump’s efforts to rid the National Security Council of Obama holdovers, who were suspected of leaking national security secrets to the press. After extensive research, Harvey compiled a list of suspected leakers and reportedly delivered it straight to the president, who then took his list to McMaster.

Even though President Trump asked McMaster to fire the individuals on the list, the NSC chief refused the president’s directives to get rid of the Obama holdovers. This comes as Congress continues to sound the alarm about the national security implications of a White House that can’t control the release of classified information.

And as the classified leaks continue to spill into the public domain at a record-high rate, the National Security Council remains staffed with a shockingly high percentage of holdovers from the Obama era. Reached for comment, a White House official estimated that well over fifty percent of the National Security Council staff are Obama holdovers.

But instead of firing the Obama holdovers, McMaster has purged several conservative Trump supporters from the ranks of the NSC.

He has also allowed top officials from President Obama’s White House to come and go in and out of the White House compound as they please. Robert Malley, Obama’s “ISIS czar,” who has been described as an apologist for Islamic terror groups, has met with National Security Council staff on multiple occasions.

Promotions to top positions in the NSC include Kris Bauman, who created President Obama’s West Bank security plan that endangers Israel’s sovereignty. McMaster has placed Bauman in charge of Israeli-Palestinian affairs at the NSC. In his Ph.D. dissertation, Bauman blamed sitting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for “inciting” Palestinian terror and demanded that Israel engage with the Hamas terrorist group. In June, Bauman’s proposal to implement his Obama-era plan into the Trump administration was leaked to anti-Israel Haaretz.

Author: Jordan Schachtel

Jordan Schachtel is the national security correspondent for Conservative Review and editor of The Dossier for Blaze Media. Follow him on Twitter @JordanSchachtel.