Posted on 06/05/2017 8:16:35 AM PDT by george76
Brian Hook, a noted Trump critic during the presidential election, is a key figure in a State Department containing many unfilled positions.
Hook is the State Department’s director of policy planning, and a Politico report Sunday citing several officials said that Hook has an inordinate amount of power in shaping American foreign policy. A State Department official confirmed this description of Hook to The Daily Caller.
The position of director of policy planning is usually an important one and serves as a think tank of sorts for the department. However, with many unfilled roles at the State Department, Hook has held even more power than previous office holders, Politico reported. 112 positions requiring Senate confirmation are currently empty at the State Department.
Hook’s influential role is noteworthy due to the fact that he ran an organization that criticized Trump during the campaign, as well as the fact that Hook himself came out against then-candidate Trump’s policies.
Hook, a former Bush administration official, served as a foreign policy adviser for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign and co-founded the John Hay Initiative. This is a neoconservative group that organized a letter of over 100 Republican foreign policy experts that refused to back Trump’s foreign policy. Hook himself didn’t sign the letter.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailycaller.com ...
No, it’s really not. We know who Reince has brought into the admin and we have solid enough reporting that his and the Democratic direction were the recommendations of the liberal Manhattan Democrat Jared Kushner.
Also...
Yet Another Trump Critic Becomes A Senior State Department Official
http://dailycaller.com/2017/06/05/yet-another-trump-critic-becomes-a-senior-state-department-official/
A spokesman for Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was no fan of Donald Trump during the presidential primary.
R.C. Hammond is senior adviser for public affairs at the Department of State and previously worked as a press secretary for Newt Gingrich’s 2012 presidential campaign.
snip
Hammond is the second key State Department official with a known anti-Trump past. Brian Hook, the director of policy planning, told Politico in 2016, “Even if you say you support him as the nominee, you go down the list of [Trump’s] positions and you see you disagree on every one.”
Negative comments about Trump reportedly kept Elliot Abrams from becoming deputy secretary of state. Hammond did not respond to an inquiry asking whether he still feels the same way about Trump. His Twitter feed is now supportive of the president.
Why is Hillary Clinton’s private server man running the US embassy in UK and undercutting Trump’s tweets?
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