Peter Schweizer: Obama Holdovers Gain Ground in Trump’s National Security Council
http://www.breitbart.com/radio/2017/08/03/peter-schweizer-obama-holdovers-gain-ground-trumps-national-security-council/
Breitbart News Senior Editor-at-Large Peter Schweizer, president of the Government Accountability Institute, talked about the purge of “America First” members of the National Security Council on Thursday’s Breitbart News Daily. SiriusXM host Raheem Kassam argued that the staff of the National Security Council has come to resemble “effectively the people that Hillary would have had in there if she was president.”
“I think there’s a couple of things going on here, Raheem. That’s exactly right,” Schweizer agreed. “You’ve got a cadre of people on the National Security Council that are holdovers from the Obama administration, and they don’t seem to be going anywhere any time soon.”
“The problem is that people in the White House staff are loyal to the people that hired them, particularly when the boss – the person that hired these NSC staffers who are still there – worked for Barack Obama. Barack Obama, of course, is highly critical of Donald Trump. You’re not going to have the kind of loyalty that you need from a White House staff,” he said.
“I don’t mean loyalty in the sense of, everybody walks in lockstep,” he added. “You want to have a diversity of opinions. But there’s just no question that NSC staffers hired by Barack Obama who obviously identify with his policies are not going to be supportive of the kind of policies that Donald Trump wants to carry out.”
“Part of the problem, I think, is that with H.R. McMaster you have a gentleman who is a distinguished military officer, and in the military, in a sense, command staff is interchangeable. If you work for General Smith, and you get transferred to work for General Jones, you are supposed to make that transition seamlessly, and a lot of them do. That’s the sort of professional ethos in the American military, and that’s what McMaster is used to,” Schweizer explained.
“That’s not the way things work in political Washington, D.C. The vast majority of the leaks that are coming out of the White House are coming out of the NSC from these Barack Obama holdovers,” he observed.
Schweizer said there was still hope for the NSC if President Trump becomes directly involved, “making it clear to General McMaster that he wants people there that are loyal to his agenda.”
“There’s no question, as you put it, that Barack Obama’s people are making up ground and advancing at the National Security Council,” he told Kassam. “People that have been let go are recent hires, so what you don’t have are people that are Trump supporters, that share Trump’s view of the world, making up ground and getting the sort of institutional knowledge that you need to have from people who are serving in the White House.”
“It is a lot of people in Obamaworld that are steering the information, and more particularly the advice, that’s being given to the president,” Schweizer cautioned. “Again, I can’t emphasize enough: General McMaster, very esteemed military officer, that’s where he came from. He does not have political experience outside of the military, and the American military is completely different in this regard than an institution like the White House, where political loyalties are hugely important and staffs are not interchangeable.”
Schweizer stressed that he holds McMaster in very high regard, but questioned his view that “the American military works so effectively in this regard, and that people are interchangeable, and that people are loyal to the mission.”
“I think he is transposing that in the White House. I think that’s part of it,” said Schweizer. “I think you also have, no question, there’s a tug-of-war going on in the White House between people who have what’s been called a more ‘globalist,’ or a worldview that essentially wants the United States to be more interventionist, be involved in things like nation-building around the world, and a faction that is more reflective of what at least Trump had said during the campaign, which is he wants the United States to have a far more limited role around the world.”
He placed McMaster squarely in the “globalist” group, but added he also has a clear desire to “serve the president well.”
“I just don’t think he’s doing so right now, in the manner in which he is handling the National Security Council,” Schweizer lamented.
Kassam asked if McMaster was being steered in this unproductive direction by outside influences, a question Schweizer found difficult to answer, although he was inclined to believe McMaster follows his own philosophy.
“I think it’s kind of naive, frankly, about the way Washington works,” he said. “But you also have, there’s no question, other people circling around the president and in senior positions in the White House who do have a philosophical or ideological view of America’s role in the world that’s very different from the president’s. That grouping, of course, would include people like Gary Cohn. It would certainly include Jared Kushner.”
Schweizer said this group has been “far more favorable to the globalist view – the United States needs to be involved in a lot of international institutions, we need to have a lot of international obligations like the Paris treaty.”
“I give McMaster a pass in the regard that I don’t think he has that same ideological commitment that others do, but that said, he’s still not serving the president well because I don’t think he is grasping the sort of institutional machinery that you need to have in the White House, the fact that you need political loyalists there giving it advice,” he said.
Schweizer repeated that presidents “need to be given diverse opinions and views,” but their advisers must retain the mindset that “we want this American president to succeed, to look good, and to ride high.”
“You’re not going to get that from people on the NSC who are hired by Barack Obama and are loyal to him,” he contended.
Kassam concluded the interview by asking Schweizer for his take on Wednesday’s RAISE Act press conference, announcing a new merit-based immigration policy. Schweizer said Kassam was correct to describe it as the policy Americans voted for in 2016.
“For the life of me, I’m not quite sure what all the objections are to,” said Schweizer. “You know, the United States is often compared to other countries, whether it’s the U.K. or Canada, and the argument is always that those countries are so much more humane in so many areas. Well, these are in effect the immigration policies that lots of those other countries have.”
“The simple point is that there is no ‘right’ to immigrate to the United States,” he said. “My parents were immigrants, they came from Europe. I believe in immigration, but we should be encouraging, and we should be insisting upon, immigrants that come to the United States have skill sets and are a net benefit to the country. I don’t mean they all need to have PhDs, but they do need to be people that work hard.”
“I think it’s a very good step forward, and I think the reaction that a lot of activists on the left are having is going to backfire, because this is a common-sense move that I think the vast majority of Americans think makes complete sense,” Schweizer said of the RAISE Act.
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Report: H.R. McMaster Gave ‘Explicit Instruction’ Not to Mention Obama ‘Holdovers’ in Trump Admin
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/08/03/report-h-r-mcmaster-gave-explicit-instruction-not-discuss-obama-holdovers-trump-admin/
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/08/03/report-h-r-mcmaster-gave-explicit-instruction-not-discuss-obama-holdovers-trump-admin/
A source for the Washington Free Beacon says that H.R. McMaster, National Security Adviser to President Donald Trump, protected “Obama loyalists” on his staff by forbidding employees from mentioning the fact that they were “holdovers” from the previous administration.
The report further claims that McMaster plans to fire “at least four other senior NSC officials” loyal to President Trump in the coming weeks — after firing three nationalist senior National Security Council officials.
From the Washington Free Beacon:
One veteran GOP foreign policy hand who has been in constant contact with the administration since its transition to the White House told the Free Beacon that McMaster has sought to downplay outstanding issues with Obama-era holdovers believed to be undermining the administration.
“One of the first things H.R. McMaster did when he took over the NSC was order all the staffers who came in with Trump to stop talking about Obama ‘holdovers.’ It was an actual, literal, explicit instruction,” the source said. “He didn’t want anyone pointing out how Obama loyalists were still in place, undermining President Trump, and leaking against him.”
“After he was done protecting the entrenched bureaucracy McMaster went on offense, which is what you’re seeing now,” the source said. “He’s purging the people who came up with Trump and are genuinely loyal to him.”
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NSC Purge: McMaster ‘Deeply Hostile to Israel and to Trump’
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/08/03/national-security-council-mcmaster-purging-pro-israel-staff-undermines-trumps-agenda/
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/08/03/national-security-council-mcmaster-purging-pro-israel-staff-undermines-trumps-agenda/
Jerusalem Post columnist Caroline Glick wrote Wednesday evening that National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster is purging pro-Israel staff from the National Security Council (NSC), turning the administration against President Donald Trump’s policies.
In a Facebook post, Glick noted that “all of these people” whom McMaster has fired this week — Rich Higgins, Derek Harvey, and Ezra Cohen-Watnick — “are pro-Israel and oppose the Iran nuclear deal, positions that Trump holds.”
She noted that the firings were the latest evidence that NSA McMaster is “deeply hostile to Israel and to Trump”:
According to senior officials aware of his behavior, he constantly refers to Israel as the occupying power and insists falsely and constantly that a country named Palestine existed where Israel is located until 1948 when it was destroyed by the Jews.
Many of you will remember that a few days before Trump’s visit to Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – בנימין נתניהו and his advisers were blindsided when the Americans suddenly told them that no Israeli official was allowed to accompany Trump to the Western Wall.
What hasn’t been reported is that it was McMaster who pressured Trump to agree not to let Netanyahu accompany him to the Western Wall. At the time, I and other reporters were led to believe that this was the decision of rogue anti-Israel officers at the US consulate in Jerusalem. But it wasn’t. It was McMaster.
And even that, it works out wasn’t sufficient for McMaster. He pressured Trump to cancel his visit to the Wall and only visit the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial — ala the Islamists who insist that the only reason Israel exists is European guilt over the Holocaust.
Glick noted that the three latest firings were not McMaster’s first attack on pro-Israel officials, or those critical of radical Islam. Two others had already been assigned to other jobs outside the National Security Council, she said.
Meanwhile, she noted, McMaster has replaced pro-Israel officials with anti-Israel, anti-Trump officials, and he allowed anti-Israel Obama holdovers to continue in their jobs:
[McMaster] fires all of Trump’s loyalists and replaces them with Trump’s opponents, like Kris Bauman, an Israel hater and Hamas supporter who McMaster hired to work on the Israel-Palestinian desk. He allows anti-Israel, pro-Muslim Brotherhood, pro-Iran Obama people like Robert Malley to walk around the NSC and tell people what to do and think. He has left Ben (reporters know nothing about foreign policy and I lied to sell them the Iran deal) Rhodes’ and Valerie Jarrett’s people in place.
(Malley was notoriously fired by Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign for meeting with the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas and advocating negotiations with them. He was later brought into President Obama’s administration to negotiate with Iran, and advised Obama — evidently poorly — on how to fight the Islamic State.)
Glick noted that “McMaster disagrees and actively undermines Trump’s agenda on just about every salient issue on his agenda,” including the Iran deal: “As for Iran, well, suffice it to say that McMaster supports the deal and refuses to publish the side deals Obama signed with the Iranians and then hid from the public.”
She also noted the irony that Trump had only hired McMaster, under pressure, because he was recommended by Sen. John McCain (R-AZ):
Finally, there is the issue of how McMaster got there in the first place. Trump interviewed McMaster at Mara Lago for a half an hour. He was under terrible pressure after firing Flynn to find someone.
And who recommended McMaster? You won’t believe this.
Senator John McCain. That’s right. The NSA got his job on the basis of a recommendation from the man who just saved Obamacare.
Glick expressed disbelief that Trump could fire former General Michael Flynn as NSA “essentially for nothing,” while allowing McMaster to attack Israel, and undermining the rest of the Trump administration’s foreign policy, with impunity.
She suggested that Trump replace McMaster — or else Israel might begin to reconsider its embrace of Trump:
If McMaster isn’t fired after all that he has done and all that he will do, we’re all going to have to reconsider Trump’s foreign policy. Because if after everything he has done, and everything that he will certainly do to undermine Trump’s stated foreign policy agenda, it will no longer be possible to believe that exiting the nuclear deal or supporting the US alliance with Israel and standing with US allies against US foes — not to mention draining Washington’s cesspool – are Trump’s policies. How can they be when Trump stands with a man who opposes all of them and proves his opposition by among other things, firing Trump’s advisers who share Trump’s agenda?
She said that Trump should not fear criticism for firing another adviser:
One source claims that Trump’s political advisers are afraid of how it will look if he fires another national security adviser. But that makes no sense. Trump is being attacked for everything and nothing. Who cares if he gets attacked for doing something that will actually help him to succeed in office? Why should fear of media criticism play a role here or anywhere for this president and this administration?
Glick added, wryly: “Obviously, at this point, Trump has nothing to lose by angering McCain. I mean what will he do? Vote for Obamacare?”
