Rex Tillerson, Mike Pompeo, and Tom Cotton play musical chairs.
Discussions to remove Rex Tillerson from the State Department and replace him with CIA director Mike Pompeo have been going on for months, even if State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert says White House chief of staff John Kelly is telling State the “rumors are not true.”
Those “rumors” were actually a well-sourced New York Times story that said Tillerson could be out “within the next several weeks.” To replace Pompeo, the Timessaid, President Trump would tap one of his strongest Senate allies, Arkansas’s Tom Cotton, to head up the CIA. Read more... |
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What About the CIA?—Pompeo has viewed his post at the CIA as a dream job. Despite coming into the agency as a political type (a three-term Republican congressman from Kansas), he has established a good rapport with the employees in Langley amid tense relations between the intelligence community and President Donald Trump.
Morale among some officials at the CIA has been down in the last several years, in part due to the broad condemnation among politicians of the agency’s enhanced interrogation techniques (dubbed by opponents as “torture”) and the government’s justification of using them on terrorism suspects. The previous CIA director’s ambiguous defense of EIT did little to encourage demoralized CIA officials. Read more... |
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Middle East Peace Watch—At Axios, Jonathan Swan reports that Jared Kushner will “appear at the Saban Forum, an annual meeting of U.S. and Israeli leaders organized by the Brookings Institution, on Sunday to talk about the Trump administration's efforts to broker a peace agreement between the Israelis and the Palestinians.”
The White House declined to comment Thursday when I asked whether Kushner would be revealing details of the administration’s peace plan. But as I recently reported in the magazine, two policy experts who have consulted with the White House say the team, led by Kushner and longtime Trump Organization legal adviser Jason Greenblatt, was preparing to circulate a draft plan as early as mid-December. A White House official denied there was any timetable to release a plan. Read more here. |
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| Must Read Of the Day—My colleague John McCormack traveled to Alabama for the cover story of the brand new issue of the magazine. John reports on the state of things in the U.S. Senate race there. Here’s a taste: . . . the Moore campaign and its supporters have taken their bunker mentality and war on the press to a whole new level—which is what you might expect from a Senate campaign in which the candidate faces multiple accusations of misconduct that ranges from merely disgusting to criminal.
Rodney Ivey, like most Moore supporters, says he simply doesn’t believe the allegations against Moore. “The way he looked when he talked about it tonight—the look in his eye—there’s no truth to none of that,” Ivey told me outside the community center in Henager.
But didn’t he find the number of accusers troubling? “Five or six can come out just as easy as one or two if you get the right ones to come out,” Ivey said. “They’ve all worked for the Democrat party. They’ve all had their picture made with Hillary.” Asked where he read that all of Moore’s accusers worked for the Democratic party, Ivey said he wasn’t sure. (In fact, only one accuser worked for the Clinton campaign.) Had Ivey read the original Washington Post report? “I have not read it all, but my girlfriend reads them all and she tells me about them.” Read McCormack’s full story here. |
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| Shutdown Watch—From the Washington Post: “President Trump has concluded that a government shutdown might be good for him politically and is focusing on his hard-line immigration stance as a way to win back supporters unhappy with his outreach to Democrats this fall, according to people who have spoken with him recently.” |
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2018 Watch—A new poll of next year’s Senate race in Utah shows incumbent Republican Orrin Hatch defeating his likely Democratic challenger, Jenny Wilson, by 15 points. But Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor and Republican presidential nominee, would beat her by a whopping 51 points.
Hatch has been in the Senate for more than 40 years and will be 84 years old next Election Day. He has denied reports he plans to retire. |
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